"A DAUGHTER OF THE SOIL": THEMES OF

DEEP TIME AND EVOLUTION IN THOMAS

HARDY'S JESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES
by KEVIN PADIAN
*Thomas Hardy is never far from Nature in his Wessex novels,- his
people reflect the character of the land as much as the land itself
reflects the brooding fatalism of the events in his novels.1 Egdon Heath,
/it has often been said, virtually functions as a dramatis persona in
many of these novels, notably Return of the Native. Tess is described
by the mother-in-law she never meets as a "child of the soil", and out
of her element (in Alec's society, amidst Angel's philosophical musings,
or on her aborted visit to his parents) she is as disoriented as any of
Hardy's characters uprooted from their rural lives.2 Hardy's characters,
with notable exceptions such as Eustacia Vye, draw strength from their
natural surroundings, and Tess is at once most blissful and most
voluptuous when she moves among the weeds, fields, and forest.5
The extensive literature on Hardy's connection with Nature includes
many valuable insights about the influences of Darwinian theory on
his writing.3 Much of this literature has concentrated on the evolutionary
processes of adaptation, natural selection, chance, and preservation
that are found and explored in the writings of Darwin, Huxley, Wallace,
Spencer, and other prominent Victorian Darwinians.4 These processes
threatened the social fabric of Victorian England by positing an
uncaring, mechanistic universe that did not accommodate divine design,
chain-of-being stratification of social class, or providential separation
of humans from other animals. The social criis that this materialistic
realization precipitated have been eloquently explored by many writers.
And, without doubt, this aspect of Darwinian thought, particularly in
its Spencerian incarnation, had the greatest consequences for social
philosophy in the later Victorian Era. But these evolutionary processes
are really only part of what Darwin was talking about, and only part of
what Hardy used in his fiction.
There is a deep structure to Darwin's theory that underlies his ideas
about the evolutionary processes that can be observed in domesticated
populations - the same ones that Darwin used as justification for his
analogy between the artificial selection of plant and animal breeders
and the natural selection that he visualized throughout the sweep of
geologic time.5 We commonly think of the populational concept of
Natural Selection, one of Darwin's main contributions to evolutionary
thought, as the simple bromide "survival of the fittest", but this
oversimplifies Darwin's view and colours how we perceive Darwinian
themes in literature. Two other concepts, both of which act at

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 evolutionary scales beyond the population level - are essential to
understanding his full argument in the Origin of Species and other
works. First is the acceptance of what John MacPhee6 has called "deep
time" - the recognition that the Universe is almost inconceivably
ancient, and so all the processes of the Earth and its life have been
going on for an enormous span of time. Second, because evolution is
a Markovian process,7 everything in the Universe, animate and inanimate
alike, bears the mark of its history as it has changed through time. For
the purposes of discussion I will refer to this concept as "evolutionary
legacy".8 Deciphering these marks, unravelling their history, and seeing
the influence that the past has had on the present is the business
of evolutionary biology. Darwin was well aware of all these points
(in fact, they were central to his thinking), and I argue that Hardy
internalized and used them more than any other Victorian novelist to
draw out the contrast between the events that involve his characters'
lives and the spatial and temporal background against which they are
set. In this essay I will first treat the concept of "deep time", then
"evolutionary legacy", and finally show how these inter«aS' with some
of the populational processes that include Natural Selection in the
context of Hardy's novels, particularly Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
Deep time. The concept of "deep time" recognizes that the ages of
the Earth and the Universe must exceed any scales of human memory
or history by many orders of magnitude. Before Darwin's day, most
estimates of the age of the Earth (by no means all theologically based)
were in the thousands of years, but this figure steadily increased until,
by the publication of the Origin in 1859, Darwin was able to moot
figures ranging in the hundreds of millions without shocking most of
the literate members of his audience. Darwin understood "deep time"
as few biologists did (then and now) because he was trained in geology
and paleontology, as well as in biology. He was a close correspondent
and friend of Charles Lyell, and avidly read the three volumes of his
Principles of Geology (1831-33) as they successively appeared during
his voyage on HMS Beagle. Deep time was necessary for the
evolutionary processes that Darwin described to do their work of
developing the diversity of organic beings, as well as to shape the
Earth itself into its present form. Hardy understood Darwin intimately;
his attachment to Nature and to the Earth, like Darwin's, did not depend
on regarding human existence teleologically ("Let me enjoy the earth
no less / Because the all-enacting Might / That fashioned forth its
loveliness / Had other aims than my delight"). It is precisely this broad
expanse of time, time beyond human comprehension or measure, with
all its evolutionary legacy, that provides the dimension necessary for
Darwin's processes to realize their potential effects. Deep time and
natural selection have a curious, sometimes apparently conflicting
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relationship that can best be understood, as I will show, by decoupling
the populational consequences of evolutionary processes from their
actions in individual cases - as Hardy does in his novels.
Evolutionary legacy. The second argument of Darwin's that requires
explanation is evolutionary legacy. If a great age for the Earth is
accepted, and if organisms change through time while they inherit
features from their ancestors, then every organism must bear in its
composition a mixture of past history and present exigencies. The term
"evolutionary legacy" or "historical legacy" is often used in evolutionary
biology to describe characteristics that are possessed simply because
they are inherited. They are not necessarily useless; they are just
inherited patterns (four legs or six; five fingers or seven). This legacy
can apply not just to animate beings, but to the characteristics of a
landscape. Darwin's view of evolutionary legacy required deep time
for its unfolding. His "long argument" in the Origin of Species depends
upon this idea, which he applied to the evolution and maintenance of
adaptive structures, of species and higher groups, of biogeographic
patterns, and of geological landforms. His last book, devoted to the
action of worms on soil, was no valedictory work of his dotage, as
Gould notes, but a graphic demonstration of how the modest but
relentless activities of some of the humblest of creatures, given enough
time, could determine not only the arability of land but also the
reformation of the entire face of the landscape.9
Hardy absorbed Darwin's understanding of evolutionary legacy, and
used it to explore several scales of time and history throughout his
novels, most notably in Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Tess is a novel that
exudes evolutionary themes from its opening to its closing passages,
and Hardy is constantly finding new ways to remind his readers that
legacy is all around us; it is inescapable. Some of the first words
spoken in the novel ("Good night, Sir John"), which set in motion the
entire ineluctable, tragic mechanism of the narrative, are tied to
evolutionary legacy in the form of inheritance. Parson Tringham, the
speaker, is (by Hardyan coincidence) not just a parson, but an
antiquarian; and not just an antiquarian who collects potsheds ef or
Jacobean furniture, but a genealogist who deals with the histories and
evolutionary fortunes of the people of his parish.10 The patterns of
history mark those who bear their legacy. Parson Tringham expresses
this in the trivial sense that John Durbeyfield retains the nose and chin
of his noble ancestors - "a little debased"; but as we soon see, historical
legacy both enables and haunts the protagonist of this novel, and brings
her to her doom in a way that is not dramatically possible for her
agrarian companions.
The scales at which Hardy explores evolutionary legacy in Tess
vary from the cultural and genealogical to the geological and even
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astronomical. It is perhaps strange to think of all these scales together,
when they might so clearly be divided into historic and prehistoric, but
Hardy is constantly moving among them, here pointing out a church
from Gothic times, there reminding us of the ancient age of the stones
used to build it, effectively allowing the historic to become prehistoric
(and vice versa). But there is power in revealing, as Hardy does, the
emergent properties of each level of temporal scale. On the one hand,
the life and labours of a single farmhand may seem insignificant; but
the actions of groups of them through time transform the landscape
into well-sculpted fields and farms, which then take on a social and
political significance.
In Hardy's novels, evolutionary legacy does not work at a single
temporal scale, nor are only living beings subject to evolution. The
descriptions of hills and rocks and valleys, of trees and flowers and
animals, intrude constantly on the narration. Throughout these
descriptions, Hardy constantly makes us aware of the history of these
features of pastoral life: they are ancient, they are traditional, their
origins are beyond human memory. Grimsditch (op. cit., p.45) notes
that "Hardy is fond of beginning his stories with a road, along which
a pedestrian makes his way". These pedestrians, at first mere flyspecks
in the distance, become humanized through the course of the narrative;
but before they can be so transformed, the road itself acquires deeper
significance; it becomes a Roman road, or (like many around Egdon
Heath) a far more ancient path or track, or it passes a pre-Christian
burial mound, or cuts through Paleozoic strata that impassively regard
the progress of the traveller. Hardy constantly reminds us that we are
as ephemeral against the landscape as are the birds, insects, leaves, and
flowers that surround Tess and Angel Clare as they succumb to an
environmentally induced courtship at Farmer Crick's Trantridge dairy.
Historical scales operate and emerge: humans modify the landscape,
humans construct farms, fields, towns, cultures, laws, history itself; yet
time bypasses in turn each individual human and each culture, against
the nearly immutable face of Nature. It is as if Hardy were tending a
cosmic ant-farm.
The nexus of time and legacy. Even in his early works (for example,
the astronomical discussions in Two on a Tower), Hardy expressed a
sense of history and time in the grand scale of Nature, and he provided
constant reminders that everything in the Universe has a history: not
only humans and their culture, but all of life, the Earth, and the solar
system, have changed through time. But to understand the course of
this evolution, and the depth of history, it was necessary for Victorian
science (and its culture) to realize the vast extent of time - time counted
in the millions and millions of years - that would have been necessary,
and was assumed by the study of geological strata even in the mid-
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19th century, in order for evolution to have done its work. Darwin
struggled with this vastness in Chapter IX of the Origin of Species,
trying to put figures on the amount of time it would have taken to
deposit the European geological strata, or to wear away the chalk
downs of the Weald to their present state. Hardy reflects on what deep
time meant to the Victorian consciousness in the famous passage in
Chapter XXII of A Pair of Blue Eyes, in which Knight tumbles over
the edge of a terrifying precipice and is left clinging to handfuls of
roots on the side of the cliff. Knight, whose scholarly accomplishments
include geology, cannot help contemplating the natural history as he
waits for aid that may come too late. Hardy begins witn^immediacy of
natural selection, which for Darwin works exclusively at the individual
level: "At first, when death appeared improbable, Knight could think
of no future, nor of anything connected with his past. He could only
look sternly at Nature's treacherous attempt to put an end to him, and
strive to thwart her". But then, even as the broad sheerness of the
natural face of the cliff threatens Knight, he sees embedded in the rock
before him a trilobite, gazing through him with its dead compound
eyes. And the scales of time begin to converge ("Separated by millions
of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met
in their death"). The trilobite itself is "but a low type of animal
existence" from ages with no "intelligence worthy of the name"; still,
as ari individual it takes on great significance on a human scale, as the
great course of past ages culminates in^singte moment: "The immense
lapses of time each formation represented had known nothing of the
dignity of man. They were grand times, but they were mean times too,
and mean were their relics. He was to be with the small in his death".
Hardy completes the reflection on deep time by having the vast
panorama of evolution, from primeval men back through mastodons,
iguanodons, flying reptiles, and the trilobite before him, flood Knight's
mind, "till the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him were a
present and modern condition of things". And so the convergence of
the scales of time is completed.11
Evolutionary philosophy in Hardy's development. Hardy slides
easily among the scales of time from years to eons, accepting slow but
relentless change through time - evolution - as the natural order of
things. Evolution was not a new idea when Hardy published Tess in
1891. Hardy was attracted to the anonymous, uncaring mechanistic
view of the Universe read by many into Darwin's theory - in contrast
to the ideal, fixed, divinely providential view of scientists such as
Richard Owen, who opposed mechanistic transmutation of organic
beings into others, and of the Romantic poets, whose ideals had a
similar origin in the works of the Naturphilosophen who influenced
Owen.12 Hardy, like Darwin, saw Nature as anything but malevolent,
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but he had no trust in divine Providence, as the bitter fatalism of his
novels shows. In this he echoed Darwm, whose faith was severely
shaken not so much by his fermentationof theory of transmutation,
nor even by his shock at the cruelty of humans to each other when he
observed slavery in South America during the voyage of the Beagle,
but by the death of his eldest daughter and favourite child.13 Hardy saw
this uncaring, mechanistic Universe not in the vicissitudes of Nature,
but in the mechanisms of society: in the inhumanity of British laws of
marriage and divorce (a spectre that haunts his novels from The Return
of the Native to The Mayor of Casterbridge to Jude the Obscure), in
the reforms of land enclosure that dispossessed rural people from their
homelands, and moreover in the crushing anonymity of the Industrial
Age and its heartless machinery.
It is important to distinguish between Hardy's harmonious, if not
unencumbered, view of the natural world and his view of the forces
that govern the world of people, which has seemed to so many critics
overwhelmingly pessimistic. Roger Robinson (op. cit., p. 149) rightly
notes that Hardy "provides not a version of Darwinism but a work
made up of deeply felt responses to it". Certainly Hardy responded to
the idea that natural processes (forces) shape the destinies of organic
beings through selection, adaptation, and survival - but in ways that
differed between humans and other organisms. Darwin wrote in the
Origin of Species (Chapter III) that
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see
superabundance of food; we do not see or we forget, that the birds
which are idly singing round us mostly live on insect or seeds,
and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely
these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by
birds and beast of prey; we do not always bear in mind, that,
though food may be now superabundant, it is not so all seasons of
each recurring year.
Hardy, like Darwin, saw this struggle for existence as necessary, but
not necessarily malevolent, except on a human scale, where the
perspective changes utterly. Again, here is Darwin at the end of Chapter
III on the struggle for survival:
When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with
the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear
is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the
healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.
Hardy's reaction to this strand of Darwinism is clear: he saw the
countless daily acts of Nature, impassively cruel to an anthropocentric
observer, as morally blank, while at the same time he saw even the
least spiteful, neglectful, or even unconscious acts of humans toward
each other as full of moral responsibility. And he extended this further
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to the conclusion that evolutionary theory implied that humans are
responsible not just for each other, but for all of nature. Two passages
in Hardy's letters convey this: "The discovery of the law of evolution,
which revealed that all organic creatures are of one family, shifted the
centre of altruism from humanity to the whole conscious world
collectively" (1909); and again in 1910:
Few people seem to perceive fully as yet that the most far-reaching
consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all
species is ethical; that it logically involved a readjustment of altruistic
morals by enlarging as a necessity of rightness the application of
what has been called "The Golden Rule" beyond the area of mere
mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom. Possibly Darwin
himself did not wholly perceive it, though he alluded to it.14
The contrast is strong between the circumstances of natural life and
those of human life. Even so, Hardy's critics persistently misunderstood
this distinction, and he was forced to take pains throughout his life to
affirm that he was no pessimist. In the posthumously published
"Introductory Note" to Winter Words, his last book of poetry, he
professed astonishment at this gloomy characterization, and further
asserted (as he had on other occasions, notably the preface to Tess)
that "no harmonious philosophy is attempted in these pages - or in any
bygone, pages of mine, for that matter". Hardy was making no
generalizations about Nature - or, for that matter, human nature. He
was no philosophizer or moralist, and resented the uplifting endings to
his novels and stories that his readers and editors forced upon him.
Again and again, in his letters, prefaces, and journals, he regards his
works solely as a series of "impressions". This conviction, on balance,
should be read straight. Hardy shows what can happen to humans
caught between their own desires and society's conventions; but no
forces of Nature - not even Egdon Heath, in its terrible beauty and
grandeur - provide a moralistic discourse in his fiction.
Hardy's scales of evolution: grand and small. To understand the
complexity of Hardy's immersion in evolutionary theory, it is useful to
review and taxonomize some biological terms that figure in the quotidian
populational processes of evolution. At the most basic evolutionary
level is fertility, without which no reproduction, no further history of
a species, can take place. The consequences of fertility are played out
through the processes of heredity, the transmission of features from
organisms to their offspring, and the vagaries of the lottery of life. The
fortunes of each new generation15 depend on many evolutionary
processes, including extinction, decline and degeneration, progress
(which is distinct from progressivism),16 natural selection (in both
hard and soft modes, as described below), and chance (with its human
corollaries, Fate and Coincidence).
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 Fertility runs through Hardy's novels; it is, after all, the business of
rural communities. Tess labours to harvest grain, to milk cows, and to
pull turnips (in a wintry, desolate field at bleak Flintcomb-Ash that
simultaneously communicates past fecundity and present barrenness in
an infinitely repeated annual cycle). The fields and fens that Hardy
describes are buzzing with bees and butterflies, exploding with pollen-
and nectar-laced flowers, vitalized by rains and streams. This is evident
in the famous passage of Chapter 19 in which Tess, trying to observe
Angel playing his harp, moves stealthily through a garden of weeds
engorged with seminal and vital fluids; and in this opening passage of
Chapter 20:
The season developed and matured. Another year's instalment
of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such
ephemeral creatures took up their positions where only a year ago
others had stood in the place when these were nothing more than
germs and inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth
the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in
noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible
jets and breathings.
The sense of sex, of ripeness, of the urge to procreate, is nearly
overwhelming at every turn in the early part of the novel. Even Tess's
oversized family represents impecunious fertility. When we first meet
Tess, she is participating in the annual May Day walk of the last
women's club in England to preserve the tradition (note the harbinger
of extinction). She wears a virginal white gown, carries in one hand a
willow and in the other a bunch of flowers, dual symbols of male and
female fertility on a day celebrating fetility itself.17 The novel is full
of descriptions of the fertility of Nature, with ploughings, matings,
plants in flower all over. Tess herself becomes an unwilling symbol
of fertility when she becomes pregnant. It is an easy transition from
fertility to heredity, in the form of plant and animal husbandry -
breeding to encourage beneficial or desirable characteristics and to
weed out others. This, of course, was the basis of the artificial selection
of breeders that in turn formed the basis of the grand analogy of
Darwin's theory of natural selection. But Hardy's characters seldom
use the wisdom of husbandry in making their own choices about mating
and procreation.
What do humans pass to their offspring, and why is this legacy so
central to Hardy's Tess? It is instructive to contrast the meanings of
two words in the context of this novel (though neither is used in it):
heredity and genetics.18 Darwin understood the artificial selection of
plant and animal breeders, and used it to build his analogy of natural
selection as responsible for the diversity of past and present life.19
Hardy had a similar understanding of husbandry, but chose to play the
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genetic potential of hereditary traits against its inevitable dilution in
the flesh and in society, as human emotion and circumstances frequently
conspire to ruin an individual's prospects (Jude's ill-advised marriage
to Arabella is a case as clear as Tess's). In human terms, often what is
inherited (heredity) is more than just corporeal: it is material and social;
whereas the genetic component includes the individual's potential, his
or her native ability or acumen that will determine future success.
So, for example, Alec inherits wealth and social position, but
constitutionally he cannot meet its challenges; Tess inherits little, but
her personal qualities (and genealogical legacy) gain her many
opportunities. Tess's beauty and sensuousness (an initial factor in her
success, using "success" as a neutral term) come from her mother, but
she inherits little else from her. Her resolve and determination do not
come from her father, but perhaps from her father's ancient lineage, a
"racial memory" of characteristics (see below). Alec's title is usurped,
so he has no genetic store of resolve to draw on from his parvenu
parents.
The question of genetic mixing and the consequent dilution of
bloodline becomes almost mystical in Angel's attitude toward the
ancient noble families of the region. He tells Retty Priddle (erst
Paridelle) that she will not make a good dairymaid because her once-
noble lineage is worn out, but he encourages and rewards a youngster
known only as Matt because his anonymous family has no such apparent
spectres of history to live up to. It may seem curious that Angel does
not realize that all human lineages must be of equal length of descent,
and therefore of equal historical venerability (or degeneracy); but
venerable age is not only the issue. Quality is maintained in breeding
lines by mating individuals with similarly desirable traits (or at least
the pedigree that maintains that they should be there); this is the genetic
basis of aristocracy in nearly any culture. Hardy uses the dilution of
"noble blood" ironically when, early in the novel, the young Angel
passes over Tess when choosing a partner at the May Day dancing:
"So much for Norman blood unaided by Victorian lucre", the narrator
muses. Angel, a middle-class cynic (fallen idealist), is both enamoured
of the ancient aristocracy's venerability and disgusted by its deterioration
and decline.20 In a famous passage in Chapter 19 Hardy describes a
garden of weeds that smell pungent but are as colourful as cultivated
flowers; this is clearly an allusion to Tess's humble circumstances and
bucolic beauty, but also to the strength and hardiness of good rural
English stock, including its people. Tess's stock may have been diluted
through generations of casual marriage, but she is clearly an atavism -
a throwback; and this is why, in an evolutionary (deep-historical) sense,
she is a character worth building a novel around: she holds that
connection to deeper time, to genealogical legacy.
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 Under the-rubric of heredity falls not only ancestral traits but
ancestral memory. Hardy suggests at several points that Tess's resolve
and determination come from her distant past, and this is echoed when
Tess slaps Alec with her gauntlet when he becomes too forward with
his attentions on the hayrick. The legend of the spectral d'Urberville
coach crops up at four opportune (if clumsy) places in the novel,
notably after Tess's marriage to Angel, when she is frightened by the
coach outside. Angel, who like everyone else except the Durbeyfields
seems to know the old legend, regards her reaction as just some inherited
"dim knowledge". Juliet McLauchlan21 quotes Raymond Blathwayt's
1892 "Chat with the author of Tess", in which Hardy stated that "The
murder that Tess commits is the hereditary quality, to which I more
than once allude, working out in the impoverished descendant of a
once noble family"; and she goes on to cite many other instances of
inherited (often atavistic) behaviours and memories in Hardy's work.
The hereditary quality of purebred stock declines through the
admixture of less pure or inferior stock; but as one's stock falls,
another's rises. Alec's father acquires through industry and (it is hinted)
more than a little deviousness not only considerable wealth, but the
ancient name of Tess's family. The selective value of adaptive traits
will differ through time as the adaptive regime changes; Tess has the
opportunity for upward mobility not just through her unusual beauty,
but also through her improved education (she is schooled by a London-
trained teacher), of which one benefit is the King's English. She speaks
the local dialect at home, and Hardy describes in ironic evolutionary
terms the conversation between the more intellectually worldly Tess
and her mother, who still consults books of superstition: when Tess
and her mother are together, "the Jacobean and Victorian eras were
juxtaposed" and a gulf of two centuries of culture collapses between
them. Here, Hardy may see progress in evolution, but it is not
progressivism. The notion that the human condition was continually
improving would have been anathema to Hardy, because so much of
time-honoured culture and values is lost in the process. And Tess
resists Angel's suggestion to teach her history (Chapter 19): she does
not want to know that she is "one of a long row only . . . that your
nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' aiid
thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands'
and thousands". Ironically, this keeps her from understanding her own
genealogical legacy.
The stamp of history. In this novel, it is not only the ancient noble
families that have become extinct. The custom of club-walking, the
consultation of conjurors, the labour-intensive grain harvest, the
hereditary occupation of rural cottages - all are passing beneath the
relentless tread of history. Tess's improved education and speech
74
symbolize the evolutionary replacement and extinction of provincial
culture and dialect. The local accent, we learn in chapter 2, is marked
by the rich pronunciation of the syllable "ur", one that occurs both in
"d'Urberville" and "Durbeyfield", and is responsible for a pursing of
the mouth that is particularly becoming in Tess. Hardy was schooled
in French and Latin but he studied German only through a periodical,
The Popular Educator, when he was fifteen; thus it is a leap of inference
to suggest that he knew that the German meaning of "ur" is "primitive,
original, primeval", as in Ursprung (origin), Urzeit (ancient times),
and Urmensch (primitive man). But on this supposition, it might emerge
why the syllable resounds in both the ancient, noble "d'Urberv///e.s"
and the degenerate, perhaps even atavistic (or simply persistently
primitive?) "Dxxbeyfields," names that mirror the family slide from
manor to meadow. The decline from the ancient knights to Tess's
father is so complete that he is initially not even aware that they
existed (no racial memory here); they are buried like fossils in Kingsbere
(kings' bier) - sub (below) - Greenhill (green hill), as fitting a locale
for a crypt as one could ask.22
In Tess, human legacy (both in the sense of inherited characteristics
and inherited possessions) is put to the test by circumstances of fate,
the stalking horse for Hardy's brand of natural selection. Tess returns
home to Marlott after the season of turnip-pulling and threshing at
Flintcomb-Ash because her mother is desperately ill. Ironically, she
recovers, but Tess's father dies, presumably of heart failure.23 With
him goes the family's right to inhabit the house, and so the widow and
children are summarily put out upon the road. This heartless
circumstance is a result of the conversion of small, individually-owned
farms to large baronial ones - a process known as "enclosure",
facilitated by the need for British grain production to keep up with
American rates of production, plus the need to use the massive
machinery that made the enhanced rates possible. The local merchant
class had long ago been put out of their homes, Hardy's narrator
explains, to make room for cottagers working on the lands. These
merchants had gone to the cities, where they could ply their trade, and
where they were followed by many of their clients. This process, Hardy
writes (Chapter 5), was "humorously designated by statisticians as 'the
tendency of the rural population towards the large towns', being really
the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery".
Machinery it certainly is, and not just the political machinery of
land ownership and management, but also the machinery of the
Industrial Age, winnowing an artificial selection of its survivors. This
machinery and the new selective regime that accompanied it brought
about the extinction of country farms, country ways, country dialects,
country music and culture, and hand labour - as witnessed in the
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comments of the old farmworkers about the difference between
collecting grain by hand and feeding sheaves to the maw of the
motorized thresher.
Selective regimes, whether artificial or natural, change through time
as the effective environment of an organism changes. An organism
cannot prepare for such changes; even staying generally adaptable is no
guarantee of success. Natural selection, however, has two modes: hard
and soft. Hard selection is catastrophic and indiscriminate, inconsiderate
of whom it destroys, as when a hurricane razes an entire forest; it does
not sort its victims and survivors genetically. Soft selection is more
dependent on the ability of the individual.24 This emphasis of soft
selection is much closer to Darwin's conception of natural selection,
and it is the main bright hope of Hardy's Providence. With ability, an
individual has at least the chance of prevailing in the world. Tess's
mother sends her to her false cousin's manor under the pretence that her
name will gain her favour; yet she confides frankly to her husband that
Tess's looks will be what gains her what she wants - as her own did.
Many of Hardy's main characters, through individual ability and acumen,
appear to have the chance to make or break their own destiny. This is
how Hardy personalizes the cosmic ant-farm. Tess succeeds at all kinds
of labour; Angel fails in Brazil; Alec fails at everything.
Chance and the human scale. The evolutionary legacy that Hardy's
characters inherit may enable an almost limitless human potential
(as in Jude the Obscure). Yet against individual acumen Hardy pits
Fate, and its handmaiden Coincidence, to manipulate the events that
govern human lives, often with a tragic outcome. Darwin saw the
individuals of all species, and most species themselves, as doomed.
He did not, however, regard this as tragic, as discussed above. For him
the "tangled bank" metaphor of species interactions is synergistic: the
fates of all organisms are interrelated in the ecological web of life.
There is nothing coincidental about the presence or absence of these
species, as he noted in Chapter III of the Origin of Species. In the
closing paragraph of the book, Darwin returned to the "tangled bank"
to stress the natural "laws" (we might say "processes") that shape their
ends. On a human scale, Darwin shared with Hardy a jaundiced view
of Divine Providence, as noted earlier. But Fate, or Chance, for Hardy
is vastly different than it is for Darwin. In the novels Fate intervenes,
usually to complicate or frustrate the lives of otherwise good and
virtuous people; it provides a maleficent direction to the course of
events.25
Darwin saw chance as a series of determined imponderables: only
epistemological ignorance keeps us from figuring out the myriad causes
behind it. For Hardy, the picture is far more bleak when he deals on a
human scale. Fate directs the affairs of men, most commonly to frustrate
76
their dreams, lay waste their accomplishments, and create terrible
misunderstandings. Only the British marriage and divorce laws
command more of Hardy's antipathy in his novels (and, indirectly, in
his poems) than does "Providence". The individual has no chance
against cosmic forces such as these. Is this so radically different from
Darwin's view? After all, what matters in evolutionary biology today
(though not, ironically, to Darwin) is not the success of the individual
- we are all doomed to die some day - but the continued propagation
of the species, the passing on of shared traits, modified to adapt to
ever-changing surroundings through the vast abyss of geologic time.
If we pass on our traits, - our genes, in modern parlance - that is our
best hope. Yet there is only a gruesome hope in Hardy's Tess, as at the
end of the novel Angel walks off with Tess's sister, who of course
carries more genetic similarity to Tess than anyone in the world.26 But
this is the difference between fiction and science. The tragedy of novels
is only possible because we allow ourselves the luxury of ruminating
on the scale of individual lives. Hardy makes the point that we are all
like Knight's trilobite, at once frozen in an eternal anonymity, while
capable through the individuation of circumstance of a real human
poignancy that transcends time.
NOTES
1. Among many essays on this subject, particularly in relation to Tess, see H. B.
Gpmsditch, Character and Environment in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London:
Witherby, 1925), especially Chapters II and IV; H. C. Webster, On a Darkling
Plain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), especially Chapter II; Roy
Morrell, Thomas Hardy: The will and the way (Kuala Lumpur: University of
Malaya Press, 1965), especially Chapter VII; and especially Bruce Johnson, "The
Perfection of Species' and Hardy's Tess", in Nature and the Victorian Imagination
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). The novels that most strongly
embody the connection of humans to nature are Tess, Return of the Native, The
Woodlanders, and the parts of Far from the Madding Crowd that centre on
Gabriel Oak.
2. Angel (Chapter 19) thinks of Tess as a "daughter of the soil", and Tess' mother-
in-law (Chapter 53) refers to her, in conversation with Angel, as a "mere child of
the soil". The schism between town and country is deep in Hardy's novels. In
Jude the Obscure Hardy dramatized most deeply the tension and discomfort
experienced by rural people forced by circumstance to migrate to the towns,
though he also alludes to it in a different way in Chapter 5 of Tess (see below).
3. Elliot B. Gose, Jr., "Psychic Evolution; Darwinism and initiation in Tess of the
D'Urbervilles", Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 18, no. 3 (1963), pp. 261-272; Peter
Morton, "Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Neo-Darwinian Reading", Southern Review,
7 (1974), 38-50; Bruce Johnson, op. cit. (1977); Roger Robinson, "Hardy and
Darwin", in Thomas Hardy: The writer and his background, ed. Norman Page
(New York: St Martin's Press, 1980), pp. 128-150; Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots:
Evolutionary narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and nineteenth-century fiction
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). George Levine also touches on this
connection in Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of science in Victorian fiction
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
77
4. Morton (op. cit., note 9), among other commentators, has noted that on at least
two occasions in his life (1911 and 1924) Hardy contradicted the critical judgment
of Schopenhauer's dominant influence on his thought, citing instead "Darwin,
Huxley, Spencer, Comte, Hume, Mill, and others". Webster (op. cit.) explains
biographically the influence on Hardy, especially during the period 1860-1865,
of reading such works as the Origin of Species (1859) and the collection of
viewpoints by liberal theologians entitled Essays and Reviews (1860), concentrating
on the indifferent carnage of "natural selection and the bearing it might have had
on Hardy's philosophy. In contrast to this view, Gose (op. cit.) stresses both the
Darwinian view of evolution and the "older theory of evolution" that "asserts the
connection of all life and leaves room for the concept of cooperation". However,
Gose cites no sources of this view and no evidence that Hardy subscribed to this
view apart from the revealing notebook entries (1909 and before beginning Tess)
that "The discovery of the law of evolution, which revealed that all organic
creatures are of one family, shifted the centre of altruism from humanity to the
whole conscious world collectively". Joanna Cullen Brown, in Let Me Enjoy the
Earth (London: W. H. Allen, 1990), pp. 290-293, cites other supportive examples
of this more harmonious view of evolution. However, conservative Churchmen
strongly opposed this view, feeling that its Romantic or Transcendental overtones
smacked of pantheism. See A. J. Desmond, The Politics of Evolution (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989).
5. In making this "grand analogy", Darwin followed the rhetorical model of William
Paley's (1802) Natural Theology, standard reading for Darwin and all Cambridge
undergraduates (even into the 20th Century). Paley had argued that, just as the
intricate design and purpose of a watch implies a watchmaker, so the perfection
of organisms and their adaptations implied a Creator. See S. J. Gould, "Darwin
and Paley meet the invisible hand", in Eight Little Piggies (New York: Norton,
1993), pp. 135-152.
6. Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980). See also Stephen
Jay Gould, Time's, Cycle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
7. In a Markovian series, each separate event is not independent of previous events;
thus, where you can next go in time depends on where you have been. In contrast,
if you chart a series of rolls of dice, it will soon be apparent statistically that the
numbers that have already come up have no effect on the result of eachsubsequent
throw; in other words, each throw is ca^ally independent. A Markovian series is
more like a board game: you can throw a die and advance a variable (but finite)
number of steps, but where you wind up will always depend largely on where
you have just been. The path of evolution is Markovian, though we often describe
the incidence of mutations and some other evolutionary features as random.
Nevertheless, heredity in its genetic and environmental senses constrains
evolutionary, history and potential.
8. Evolutionary biologists typically call this concept "historical legacy" or the
"phylogenetic factor" in evolution (when referring to the design of organisms),
but discussions with colleagues in the humanities suggest that the term "historical"
is misleading in implying merely human history, rather than the entire sweep of
geologic time to which scientists refer. Also, the term "evolutionary" need not be
strictly biological; as it denotes "change through time" evolution can describe the
history of a mountain range, a continent, or a solar system, without implying a
genetic (i.e., biological) underpinning.
9. "Deep time" is a phrase of John McPhee's {Basin and Range; New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1980), elaborated by Stephen Jay Gould in his Time's Arrow,
Time's Cycle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). Darwin's last book
78
was The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the action of worms, with
observations on their habits (London, John Murray, 1881); see Gould, "Worm
for a century, and all seasons", Natural History, April 1982, reprinted in Hen's
Teeth and Horse's Toes (New York: Norton, 1983), pp. 120-133. Darwin credited
his own sense of time to Lyell, whose Principles of Geology (3 vols., London,
1830-33) became the standard 19th-century reference.
10. Hardy once researched his own genealogy, looking for traces of his family's
history and decline. A partial result was the poem "The Pedigree", which appears
in the same volume (Moments of Vision) as the often-quoted "Heredity", with its
lines "I am the family face; / Flesh perishes, I live on, . . . leaping from place to
place / Over oblivion". This impression echoes in the faces of Tess, her father,
and her ancestresses painted on the walls of the once-manorial farmhouse where
she and Angel stay after their wedding.
11. Patricia Ingraham ("Hardy and The Wonders of Geology", Review of English
Studies, 31 [1980], 59-64) shows the extent to which Hardy lifted the
paleontological panorama of this passage from his copy of the 6th edition of The
Wonders of Geology (1848), by Gideon Mantell, the Sussex country doctor and
naturalist who described Iguanodon, one of the first known dinosaurs. The sense
of "historical science", first and most eloquently expressed by Darwin in the
Origin of Species, is in contrast to the "ahistorical" sciences of chemistry and
physics, whose principles and patterns presumably operate anywhere and anytime
in the known Universe, so are not affected by time (history). Gould (Time's
Arrow, Time's Cycle) discusses how the realization of linear time supplanted in
many human cultures the sole reliance on cyclical (annual, seasonal) time. Hardy's
Dorset labourers, though part of a nation with a very strong sense of its history,
still principally rely on cyclical time for cues that govern the management of their
daily lives.
12. Robert Chambers' anonymous and sensational Vestiges of Creation was published
in/l844. See Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution; Philip Reid Sloan's
introduction to Richard Owen's Hunterian Lectures of 1837 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992); Nicolaas A. Rupke, "Richard Owen's Vertebrate
Archetype", Isis, 84 (1993), 231-251, and Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Chambers' Vestiges was reissued by
the University of Chicago Press with an introduction by James Secord (1994).
Dr Fitzpiers, in Hardy's The Woodlanders, was probably reading translations of
the German transcendentalists such as Goethe and Schilling.
13. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The life of a tormented evolutionist
(New York: Warner Books, 1993).
14. Joanna Cullen Brown (Let Me Enjoy the Earth, op. cit., p.290).
15. Hardy notes of the seven Durbeyfield children that they were "captives under
hatches compelled to sail" with their parents, and "who had never been asked if
they wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard
conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield".
Compare in this context the grisly murder-suicide of little Father Time in Jude
the Obscure, who dispatches himself and his siblings "because we are too menny".
In both cases Hardy is not discussing the workings of natural laws, but of human
fate.
16. Progressivism is the notion that evolution brings improvement; progress is a more
neutral term in science, implying only the change that accompanies any temporal
development of a process. For contextual details see A. J. Desmond, "Designing
the dinosaur: Richard Owen's response to Robert Edmond Grant", Isis, 70 (1979),
pp. 224-234.
79
17. Hardy's familiarity with the anthropological backdrop has been traced by Gose
(op. cit.), Grirnsditch (op. cit, Ch. Ill), and Rosemary L. Eakins ("Tess: the pagan
and Christian traditions", in The Novels of Thomas Hardy, ed. Anne Smith: London:
Vision Press, 1979, pp. 107-125), among others. It is of interest in the exploration
of historical themes that the understanding of traditions deteriorates through time
as much as physical or biological features do. The women of the walking-club
seem to have little consciousness of why they are performing this ritual, whose
origins are certainly pre-Christian; the presence of so many elder women in the
group (almost certainly composed originally of young girls) testifies to this. John
Durbeyfield does not even realize the nobility of his ancestors; his grandfather is
said to have avoided the subject because they were thought to have been unsavoury
(indeed, some more recent ancestors may have been, as the ancient ones no doubt
were in their time). These episodes recall the incident of the mummers'-play in
Return of the Native, in which all the participants play their hoary roles in
perfunctory fashion, except Eustacia, to whom the tradition is entirely new and
the passion genuine.
18. Biologists would distinguish between these terms. Genetics is the science of the
hereditary material, DNA. Heredity is the heritability of features that can be
traced to genetics. It is important to remind ourselves that genetics was unknown
to both Darwin and Hardy (at least till his later years: Mendel's experiments were
not rediscovered until the turn of the century). Hence "heredity" simply meant
those features passed from parents to offspring, and Victorian ideas about their
mechanics often involved humoural physiology and the sorts of fluid or plasmic
flow that resonate so strongly in Hardy's description of the garden of weeds in
Tess, cited previously.
19. See note 5. Paley justified "intelligent design" by the simple analogy that, just as
any structure as complex as a watch implies a watchmaker, so the complexity and
perfect adaptation of the organisms in the living world imply a Creator. Paley
needed the grand scale of plenitude to justify his analogy; Darwin needed the
acceptance of vast time. On Hardy's views of genetics and heredity, Peter Morton
(op. cit.) has written most convincingly about the mechanisms involved, and has
nicely dissected the influences of Lamarck, Darwin, and Weismann on
philosophical thought regarding transmission of inherited features. He notes that
Hardy's novels are not simple stages for Darwinism, pointing out (p. 39) that
"Hardy's use of fresh data concerning heredity and degeneration and sexual
selection is in the strictest sense aesthetic, for these themes actually commingle
with and order the narrative flow".
20. It is interesting that in this novel and even in poems such as "The Pedigree" and
"Heredity", Hardy, like Angel Clare, does not see that all lineages are equally
ancient, and that "nobility" or the acquisition of a name is (in one sense) merely
an arbitrary milestone in human genealogy.
21. J. McLauchlan, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy) (Oxford: Blackwell,
1971), pp. 33-41. See also Grirnsditch (op. cit.), Chapter IV.
22. Bere Regis (the fictional Kings-bere), the actual site of the Turbeville tombs,
is a village on the River Piddle just below Hardy's Greenhill (Woodbury Hill,
an ancient hill fort that is the site of the fair in Far from the Madding Crowd),
and King John had a hunting lodge there; it also crops up in The Trumpet-
Major.
23. Compare John Durbeyfield's death of a weak heart to the death, early in the
novel, of the family's horse (ironically named Prince, another echo of nobility),
whose heart is pierced in an accident with the mail wagon. Thus Fate removes the
two sources of gainful support from the hapless family.
80
24. In ecology, the "effective environment" of a species includes not only the physical
biome in which it lives, but also the sum of the species interactions in which it
engages, including predation, competition, mating, and other biotic factors. See
L. Van Valen, "Adaptive zones and the orders of mammals", Evolution, 25 (1971),
pp. 420-428). On the constant change in this effect^tnvironment, see L. Van
Valen, "A new evolutionary law". Evolutionary Theory, 1 (1), (1975), pp. 1-30.
Van Valen designated this feature of evolution the "Red Queen's hypothesis"
after the character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass who noted that
"it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place". The distinction
between hard and soft selection is due to the population geneticist Bruce Wallace.
In his formulation, hard selection removes unconditionally inferior genotypes;
soft selection merely replaces relatively inferior genotypes by superior ones. In
ecological terms, brought from the genotype level to the phenotype level, hard
selection is like saying at the start of a course that only eight people in the class
can receive A's. Under soft selection, for example, everyone with a grade of 90
or above receives an A.
25. In the sense discussed here, Fate refers to the patterns (and the forces behind
them) that determine the course of events. Coincidence is a special case.of the
action of Fate that entails some significance to the plotline, usually ^onic.
Coincidence would have no meaning to Darwin, because no organisms but humans
would see any significance in their fates. Chance, however, has a powerful meaning
in evolution (note the discussion of hard and soft selection above), even though
most patterns that humans label Chance have particulate determinants (as Darwin's
example of the feathers shows).
26. This note of artificial happiness was almost certainly a sop to the demands of
Victorian readers for at least a glimmer of hope at the culmination of the story.
Dorothy Van Ghent stated the point more cynically and perhaps more validly: ".
. . ^ie philosophy of an evolutionary hope has nothing essential to do with Tess's
fate and her common meaning; she is too humanly adequate for evolutionary
ethics to comment upon, and furthermore we do not believe that young girls
make ameliorated lives out of witness of a sister's hanging". ("On Tess of the
D'Urbervilles", in A. J. Guerard, ed., Thomas Hardy: A Collection of Critical
Essays. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1963.) It is possible to be analytic about the
potential role of kin selection in the Victorian novel, but in the end such an
exercise is pointedly anachronistic, except in the most informal and patrimonial
sense (though see Hardy's The Well-Beloved for an even more extreme, and some
would say ghastly, infatuation with three generations of the same woman's
incarnation). Anyway, Victorian marriage laws would have prevented Angel from
marrying his deceased wife's sister, so their future relationship could only be
Platonic.
81
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