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The four elements in Far From the Madding Crowd, novel and film: Romanticism versus naturalism

This paper addresses the issue of the four elements in the novel and the film from a formal point of view, both as the source of rhythm in the two works and as a means of situating man within the Darwinian universe. As Gillian Beer points out1, the Darwinian conception of space and time was a major crisis in Hardy’s days, i.e. the1860s-80s, while, as far as the film is concerned, by the 1970s, it had become a widely accepted and altogether unquestioned part of Western culture for modern film-goers (despite the on-going quarrel between evolutionists and creationist in the US still going on today). The crisis involved Hardy’s own complete re-assessment of his beliefs and ethics or ‘values’ as we would call them today, as H.C. Webster shows in detail2.

I will be arguing that the presence in the novel of the four elements: wind, fire, water and earth, provide a significant scenario for any film-maker attempting to make a convincingly “Hardyesque” screen transposition of the novel because they provide novel and film with rhythm. By rhythm, I mean here the tension between romanticism and naturalism, two different rhythms altogether. The minute scale of man among the elements as opposed to the presence of consciousness in man among powerful and largely unknown elements also seems to me to characterize the aesthetics as well as the ethics of both novel and film.

The wind: in and out of the acoustic continuum In the novel, the wind is introduced as early as the second chapter; it is often part of the

action and shown in the film by Gabriel’s hair being blown into his eyes, or Bathsheba’s, and very active in the storm scene which is visualized by the flapping of huge tarpaulins on top of the hayricks which have to be tied down.

More generally, in the film the sound of perpetual wind provides an acoustic continuum signifying the “here and now” of fiction, or “Hardy’s fictional Wessex”, which is a background to many scenes, among which the fall of the ewes to their death is particularly effective. The wind in this sequence is heard in two modes: a muffled continuous murmur in shots framing Gabriel asleep in his hut, and a series of louder layers of different breathing effects some of which are attributed to the resting sheep in close shots of the flock in its paddock, others to brief gusts of draught crossing the acoustic panorama like swift currents. The punctuation of the regular and indistinct continuum of the sheep’s bells, contrasting with a dog’s barking introduces tension and a sense of urgency in this acoustic composition, dimly audible with shots of Gabriel, and blaring loudly in cuts back to the scene outdoors. The bleating of the sheep adds to the sudden intrusion of another type of sound, increasingly prominent, which is diegetized by the editing of the sheep first running downwards along a slope and then falling to their death. These diegetic sounds transcribe those in the novel which are however limited to what Oak hears, without a parallel description of the sounds an observer outside would have heard (as happens in other

1. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots–Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction [1983], Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. 2. Harvey Curtis Webster, On a Darkling Plain, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1947.

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passages of the novel in chapters 52 et 53, an additional proof that parallel editing—crosscutting—pre-existed cinema).

To the shepherd, the note of the sheep-bell, like the ticking of the clock to other people, is a chronic sound that only makes itself noticed by ceasing or altering (FFMC, 32).

This description is grounded on the observation that sound can be continuously perceived as an acoustic background, similar to the wind connoting Wessex weather in the film. What is perceptible is the change in this continuum, either by silence or by sudden acceleration. Such is indeed how the sound of the wind, as well as the sound of water, as will be discussed presently, are used in the film. In the film sequence, there is no music, only an orchestrated variety of sounds, but from the moment Gabriel awakes, however, orchestra lyrical music is heard, expressing his anguish: as the sheep start running, we hear a low key string continuum and the repetition of two notes: amplification is used which superimposes orchestra intensity and the increase in power of the bleating and barking; the suggestion of electronic sound and an amplification of reverberation is also perceptible, as the tempo now freely accelerates. As the camera frames the sea-shore at the foot of the cliff (not in the novel, only a chalk pit) the sound of waves breaking and seagulls replace the orchestra with a maximum intensity: the expression of Gabriel’s anguish is now transferred to the subjective camera allowing us to discover the mangled ewes with him. This is an example of the way the sound of the wind in the film fuses with an orchestration of musical instruments which are used more for their sound than for the musical score (a feature of modern music), when we are made to share a character’s feelings.

The wind is also a dramatic agent when Bathsheba saves Gabriel’s life in the novel, as he is nearly choked to death by the smoke which the wind blows inside his hut.

*…+ he entered the hut and heaped more fuel upon the stove. The wind came in at the bottom of the door, and to prevent it Oak laid a sack there and wheeled the cot round a little more to the south. Then the wind spouted in at a ventilating hole—of which there was one on each side of the hut. Gabriel had always known that when the fire was lighted and the door closed one of these must be kept open—that chosen being always on the side away from the wind (FFMC, 20-1)

During the clover field poisoning scene, the hard breathing of the sick ewes is quite loud

and predominant, to the effect that it provides a sound continuum which is both mechanical and irregular at times: we overlook the fact that the ‘acting’ of the sick ewes collapsing and sprawling among the clover raises the question of how this was obtained, ewes not being trained beasts… The rhythm of their hard breathing is punctuated by the loud hissing sound of the gas being expelled by Oak’s piercing instrument. The sound of their “wind” as they breathe hard is contrasted with the burlesque “wind” or “fart” of recovery (a commonplace joke in farcical comedies).

Thus the natural element which obeys no rule is opposed to the wind controlled or not by the human body; the various wind instruments in both novel and film range from the pastoral flute to the band of wind instruments played by Bathsheba’s farmhands. Much is made of the music performance in the film: the camera pans from one performer to the next in a detailed review of the brass instruments, each one being closely detailed.

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Opposed to the slow panning which pauses slightly on each old-fashioned instrument (as in the novel), is the amplification of rhythm and accelerated tempo which the players are able to keep up and bring to a climatic cacophony, including a few erratic sounds which escape them, thus expressing their joy in a conclusive manner. This burlesque appropriation of the wind is in keeping with the novel’s concluding lines on Poorgrass’s “cheerful sigh as they moved away”:

*…+ bang again went the cannon in the background, followed by a hideous clang of music from a drum, tambourine, clarionet, serpent, hautboy, tenor-viol, and double-bass—the only remaining relics of the true and original Weatherbury band (FFMC, 307).

Such a naturalistic description of wind instruments playing “a hideous” music sounds as

a deconstruction of Shelley’s romantic odes to the wind and suggest a tension within the novel between two aesthetics: the romantic fluidity of reverberating echoes is contrasted with the abrupt changes in sounds produced by the wind, which are described as a natural orchestra of different streams of wind:

The thin grasses, more or less coating the hill, were touched by the wind in breezes of differing powers, *…+ one rubbing the blades heavily, another raking them piercingly, another brushing them like a soft broom (FFMC, 12)

The similes “rubbing”, “raking”, “brushing”, suggest an analogy with string instruments,

the strings of which, by analogy with the grasses, can be played in different ways by the bow. But these technicalities have little to do with the “soul” of the violin reverberating during the performance. Such a tension between an emotional drive and a more scientific observation is characteristic of the way other elements are used in the novel, the lyrical being kept under control by clinical observation. The changes in rhythm, from fluidity to percussion and vice versa are carefully introduced in the novel, and Bennett’s modern score uses these changes in rhythm whether they materialize the sound of the wind for our ears or the sight of the fire for our eyes.

The rhythm of leaping flames and flashing lights Fire is used in both novel and film as a visual element addressing our eyes while the

wind addresses our ears. The brutal glow of violent flames, “shadows danced merrily up and down, timed by the jigging of the flames” (FFMC, 39) is analysed with a pseudo-scientific eye. The flames are blown up by the wind which scatters them from rick to rick. Only by cutting off the draught underneath the hay-rick by a tarpaulin can its propagation be stopped. As the narrator tells us:

The corn stood on stone saddles, and between these, tongues of yellow hue from the burning straw licked and darted playfully. If the fire once got under this stack, all would be lost *…+ a rick-cloth was brought, and they hung it like a curtain across the channel. The flames immediately ceased to go under the bottom of the corn-stack, and stood up vertical (FFMC, 39-40)

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In addition to the common-sense, if not scientific, knowledge of fire which the scene brings forth, a more dramatic function is imparted to its violence. It is a backdrop for Gabriel and Bathsheba’s second eye-contact confrontation. While their first meeting is rich in misunderstandings of various kinds, the second meeting is in a different key, a more passionate moment in both characters which takes place amidst the turmoil of the burning rick and the struggle to control the destructive violence of the fire. In the film as well as in the novel, the tongues of the burning flames are the setting for their encounter as their eyes meet unexpectedly. The fire then becomes a metaphor for the re-kindling of Gabriel’s love for her and its failure to meet a similar feeling in Bathsheba whose mood is one of flaming rage against her bailiff. The tension between romantic love (fire as passionate love of the soul) and no-nonsense thwarted authority (fire as ambition and realism—she finds the thief and “fires” him) is patent in the scene and re-introduces the comic theme of the quarrelling couple.

However, just as fire and water are natural enemies, fire as light struggles against another equally natural opponent, the darkness of night. Fire-lit scenes are thus paired off with scenes of obscurity as much in the novel as in the film. And here too, the romantic view of solitary fires at night is, if not altogether debunked, at least enclosed within the boundaries of dramatic irony, as Bathsheba’s encounter with Troy in the erratic flashes of light of a dark lantern serve to fuel passionate infatuation as well as playful flirtation.

Fire is used with a reference to light at night in many scenes of comic relief, as in the night scene which follows the workers looking for a job in Casterbridge. Light at night here is part of a scene of popular dancing to the rhythm of Gabriel’s pipe; but it is also the light of warmth of the fire that burns in the tavern’s fireplace; such a fire is both a source of life for the new born lambs and the force that shapes the age-old mug in the tavern. The novel has a detailed description of the work of the fire upon the mug:

*…+ the God-forgive-me, which was a two-handled tall mug standing in the ashes, cracked and charred with heat: it was rather furred with extraneous matter about the outside, especially in the crevices of the handles, the innermost curves of which may not have seen daylight for several years by reason of this encrustation thereon—formed of ashes accidentally wetted with cider and baked hard […] (FFMC, 46-7).

The fire is associated with time: immemorial times for objects as well as human beings, on the one hand, but on the other hand, as the continuum of consciousness as they lose their awareness of time by gazing at its perpetual movement:

A meditation on the obvious inference was indulged in by all, and during its continuance each directed his vision into the ashpit, which glowed like a desert under vertical sun, shaping their eyes long and liny, partly because of the light, partly from the depth of the subject discussed (FFMC, 50)

Time has a fascinating power on the men who watch it pass:

*…+ the malster, removing from the fire his eyes, which were vermilion-red and bleared by gazing into it for so many years (FMC, 46)

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The film transposes the metaphor of time which obstinate gazing into the fire connotes in the novel into a less unexpected metaphor of burning desire: Boldwood’s infatuation with Bathsheba.

The storm: fire and wind More complex is the sound of elements seemingly at war with one another, a theme

which is dear to Romantic poets, but which is described in the novel with lavish technical details. The outburst of unleashed elements as when the wind and the clouds generate loud claps of thunder and flashes of lightning, in the storm scene in the novel and the film includes a parallel scene of chaos within the walls of the barn. In the film, a continuity shot frames the vicar at the pulpit saying: “Let us pray”, which serves to introduce the next shot with a close shot of a musician playing on a tambourine suggesting: “Let us dance”. Here the continuity editing on the two protagonists’ gesture and invitation to an audience is carefully ironical. This is a reference to the novel which reads:

As Oak approached the building the sound of violins and a tambourine, and the regular jigging of many feet, grew more distinct. *…+ Here sat three fiddlers, and beside them stood a frantic man with his hair on end, perspiration streaming down his cheeks, and a tambourine quivering in his hands (FFMC, 186).

Crosscutting is used to dramatize two simultaneous scenes of violence, Troy’s incipient

excess and Gabriel’s fight against the storm. The military discipline having given way to limitless freedom is dramatized by Troy’s posturing, first as a dancer with an increasing speed and intensity, then, having resisted warnings about the storm and calls for help from Gabriel, by his gesturing to the guests as he announces his marriage to Bathsheba, from the top of a ladder. In parallel with the increasingly boundless excitement which Troy is exhibiting, and encouraging among the guests (his offer of an extra “night-cap”), the camera frames the increasing violence of the storm outside. The text reads :

*…+ this melody, at the end of three-quarters of an hour of thunderous footing, still possesses more stimulative properties for the heel and toe than the majority of other dances. “The Soldier's Joy” has, too, an additional charm, in being so admirable adapted to the tambourine aforesaid—no mean instrument in the hands of a performer who understands the proper convulsions, spasm, St. Vitus’s dances, and fearful frenzies *…+ (FFMC, 186).

As these lines show, the scene focuses on the utter chaos about to take place. In the novel the parallel between the two scenes is postponed by a series of short pictures of animals who give signs of the oncoming storm, which are noticed by Gabriel; in the film, an insert on a flock of birds fleeing also connotes the oncoming storm. The novel describes the sounds of the storm as six thunderclaps: “a rumble”, “the second peal was noisy”, “rumbles became rattles”, “there was a smack—smart, clear and short”, “the fifth flash, with the spring of a serpent and the shout of a fiend”, “then came the peal”. This progression in sounds is used as a punctuation for the detailed visual effects, rendered by pictorial similes such as “like an ink stroke on burnished tin”, and the extended metaphor of hellish powers which is carried on by the threat of electrocution and death. The light punctuation is

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scientifically observed to be perceived earlier than the sound, and the progression of the flashes of lightning: “a light flapped over the scene”, “comparatively little visible lighting. Gabriel saw a candle shining in Bathshseba’s room…” “the colour of silver, and gleamed in the heavens like a mailed army”, “a blue light appeared in the zenith”, “it was green as an emerald, and the reverberation was stunning”, ending with “heavens opened then, indeed. *…+ a perfect dance of death. The forms of the skeletons…” (p. 193). The metamorphosis of the atmosphere is rendered by similes such as “as if reflected from phosphorescent wings across the sky”. In addition, each flash of lightning produces a picture in which Bathsheba’s own silhouette and cast shadow eventually appear. All this description is summed up in the sentence: “Oak had hardly time to gather up these ‘impressions’ *a key word in Hardy’s vocabulary] into a thought” when another thunderbolt ends the storm. Symbolically, a new “thunderbolt” crashes upon Oak’s ears, Bathsheba’s confession of her intention not to marry Troy in Bath after all (FFMC, 195).

In the film, we shift alternatively from full light and dance music rhythm to utter

darkness, streaks of lightning and a chaotic rhythm of loud bursts of thunder clapping in the silence of awed nature. The unleashing of natural forces reaches a climax in parallel with the chaos indoors. Besides the clash between opposite rhythms, the madness of the dance and the fury of the storm, the simultaneous scenes also introduce an intimate moment when Bathsheba takes the opportunity of confessing to Gabriel that she has been carried away by her passion and had not intended initially to marry Troy in Bath but to put an end to the connection (FFMC, 195).

The climactic intimacy of the micro-scene between Bathsheba and Gabriel during the storm in the novel (FFMC, p. 195) is dramatized in the film by the sudden intrusion of orchestra music which is only introduced after Gabriel has taken Bathsheba back to her door. Alan Bates’s face, impersonating Gabriel’s, flashes a smile of elation when he is screened in the continuing flashes of lightning after accompanying her to safety; while the camera cuts to the men asleep with drink inside the ballroom, he is seen in several brief shots to actually seem to be dancing in the wind, and orchestra music is heard in an expressionist set of strings chords and trumpet and flute, played in a percussive style not unlike Bernard Herrmann’s percussive music in Hitchcock’s films.

In this scene of intimacy, the worlds of fury and revelling, two forms of thoughtlessness, are ruled by an steadily accelerating tempo, while their short intimacy is marked by a pause as a silence in a musical performance. This connotes both a point of resonance between their “souls”, to use a romantic terminology, and a more mature capacity to protect their inner selves from external chaos. Symbolically, the motif of the dance (the folk song and resounding clogs and heels versus toes) has shifted from the revellers to the honest lover (chaotic orchestra percussive strings providing a motif by the repetition of three or four notes), a comment of the storm scene upon the revel one which clinches the parallel editing by allowing for a symbolic significance3.

This shift in connotation, echoing the “pathetic fallacy” of romantic poetry, also foregrounds the dominant theme of Hardy’s work, the contrast between the indifferent nature and man’s consciousness. In romantic poetry, Nature is not indifferent to Man, as H.C. Webster explains, and consciousness is emotionally in resonance with the elements. In

3. In this instance it might be argued that Hardy’s symbolic use of mise-en-scene is not an obstacle to adaptation but rather a model, as it has been widely used in great Hollywood feature films (for example, Gone with the Wind (1939) or The Ten Commandments (1956)).

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naturalist descriptions, as the scene of Fanny at the Barracks amply demonstrates, or later on her way to the workhouse in Casterbridge, consciousness is a battle of the will using rational methods (she uses numbers for the windows, and later to measure out her progress). And Gabriel’s battle against the elements is again grounded on a technological know-how which he then shares with Bathsheba, telling her what to do.

Just as fire is an element which transposes into visual rhythms and images the rhythm which the wind conveys acoustically, so does water share with earth the power of introducing the presence of infinitude within the microcosm of individual experience by dramatizing space and time. Again rain provides, as the wind does, an acoustic continuum in the novel and the film, while earth provides a visual and even tangible imagery of this macrocosmic dimension of the physical world.

Water In the film, the sound of waves crashing along the seashore is introduced early in the

prologue as a structural element which is recurrent in the acoustic composition of the film. It is in competition with other natural sounds which provide rhythm: the breathing in the sheep/clover scene, the wind (e.g. in the scene staging the sheep falling from cliff, or in the storm scene) and the fire (in the fire scene staging “chaos” versus “order”—a Hardyesque structural contrast which is introduced by the description of Gabriel’s flute sound in the orchestra of winds). It also eloquently replaces the dialogue between Bathsheba and Troy as she pleads to marry him, as a means to convey her passionate feelings (an instance of pathetic fallacy on screen), and is a vehicle to express Troy’s despair as he walks to the cliffs and rushes down to lose himself in the slow but irregular rhythm of the sea.

Water is also often present in the novel and in the film under the form of rain. The rainfall which follows the thunderstorm is described as brought about by the change in the direction of the wind. It is given particular significance when it spouts violently from the overhanging gargoyle on Fanny’s grave and disperses Troy’s flowers. Still in this sequence, two of Bathsheba’s maids are framed indoors behind a window pane glistening with rain and the camera then cuts to a high-angle view of Troy seeking protection from a hayrick: a close shot of his profile also emphasizes his despair by raindrops and logically announces his attempted escape by drowning. The shot framing a crown of green leaves along the top of the frame and rain drops falling upon Fanny’s coffin is a quote from the novel, and the sound track which makes us hear them is too : “the fog had by this time saturated the trees, and this was the first dropping of water from the over brimming leaves. *…+ Presently there was a continual tapping of these heavy drops upon the dead leaves, the road, and the travellers. The nearer boughs were beaded with the mist to the greyness of aged men, and the rusty-red leaves of the beeches were hung with similar drops, like diamonds on auburn hair”. The simile of diamonds operates an anamorphosis from tears connoting sadness to precious stones connoting heavenly glory.

The addition in the film of an epilogue signifying “and they lived happily ever after” includes rain outside the window in the film. A last shot on Bathsheba’s sitting room is rather ambiguous: though it might convey a sense of harmony in the unromantic but secure atmosphere of intimacy between them if the rain is seen to shut them out from the rest of the world, yet it might also be felt as an emblem of the heroine’s loss of romance, since it recalls the rain outside the room in John Huston’s concluding shot for The Dead (1987). In a similar manner, when the camera frames Gabriel looking at his own watch and then

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glancing in the direction of Troy’s automaton clock on the mantelpiece which the slow panning of the camera discloses to the left, one might feel that he is checking whether his clock is slow or not, but if we remember his watch in the first chapter of the novel, then his gaze at the automaton might be ironical. These icons of time close the film on a prospect of an orderly life and the promise of prosperity, while seemingly dismissing romantic love.

Tears and blood The motif of tears is seldom used in the novel to characterize Bathsheba, and is

transferred to rain as in the coffin scene, or the graveyard one; the screenplay seems to have introduced it in several scenes, but was suppressed, with one exception however when Bathsheba confesses her mad infatuation to her confident Liddy. The film also shows Bathsheba in tears during her encounter with Troy in Weymouth alias Bath, pleading for a hasty marriage. In both instances, she is sobbing, her body is shaken by an uncontrollable force. Tears are among the motifs which have connoted very different emotions and are therefore very ambiguous: suffering, confession, but also joy, femininity mostly, and therefore inappropriate for a female character who is emancipating from gendered clichés.

As an indoor shot frames him (chapter XI on DVD) about to call for a toast in Bathsheba’s honour, a dramatic high angle on Troy at the bottom of the stairs is framed as complete silence settles in the room. While he moves up the stairs to get hold of her wrist, the camera frames him behind the banister in a manner which makes him quite invisible, as if already erasing his picture from the screen. His voice rings all the more clearly as he claims his wife and she resists him, Boldwood’s bullet hitting him almost simultaneously. The sound track makes much of Bathsheba’s sobs as, contrary to the novel (FFMC, 291), Troy’s blood spills on his shirt and she bathes her cheek in it. The use of black, white and red as a colour scheme heightens the dramatic intensity of the shocking scene of execution. In the novel, the blast of the gun is made to express the violence of the murder (FFMC, 289: “a sudden deafening report […] the oak partition shook with the concussion *…+”). From the point of view of this paper, these contribute to a general rhythm which not only undergoes variations but also imposes such variations to the characters and their destiny (thus foregrounding the value of time as tragic agent and as comic relief).

The earth In the novel, and in the film, the fall of the sheep from the cliff adumbrates the by then

unquestioned scientific law of attraction as defined by Newton. Their fall to the ground and to their utter destruction, which entails the destruction of the wrong-minded sheep-dog, a metonymy for the careless “shepherd” (Oak asleep in his hut) is the first significant episode in which the elements are dramatized as powers on an inhuman scale. The attraction exerted by the Earth’s rotation upon its axis is already introduced in chapter 2 by the intensely poetic introduction of the major agent of the melodrama, the Cosmos, and Darwin himself sufficiently insists on the significance of Newton’s theory of gravitation for the use of the word “gravitation” in the novel to be far from innocent (see p. 44 the mention of Oak and “humane gravitation”). No sense of such a dwarfing of man’s consciousness of beauty and powerlessness appears in the film, while it is well known as the major contribution by Turner to Hardy’s visual metaphors of man.

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The earth’s circumference which is emphasized in the novel (FFMC, 11) also appears in high-angle views of the landscape in the film, as early as the opening sequence in which the camera movement itself is circular as it describes the sea and the cliffs. But the earth is also an element from a rural point of view, as it has to be tilled and its harvests must be reaped. In the novel, the source title being a quote from Gray’s “Elegy”, suggests a slow “andante” rhythm which the opening sequence of the film renders by a long tracking-panning of a crane-shot. Metaphorically, earth is also used as a setting for Bathsheba’s night in the woods, in which it is described as a swamp with an effect of pathetic fallacy. And in the film, the surface of the earth symbolizes Boldwood’s despair as he is seen roaming upon the desolate hills while the camera cuts back to Bathsheba’s cosy bedroom and the newly wed enjoying their wedding night.

Romanticism versus naturalism In such contexts, the elements have a romantic function which is Shelleyan in more than

one way, despite the above suggestion of the comic debunking of the “wind”. What H.C. Webster shows in On a Darkling Plain shows, is precisely the clash between Shelleyan romanticism and the new understanding of elements as a dramatic venue for resounding conflicts of indifferent forces. References to Shelley are found in FFMC such as the early one in chapter II, which I see as second Preface,

To-night these trees sheltered the southern slope from the keenest blasts, which smote the wood and floundered through it with a sound as of grumbling, or gushed over its crowning boughs in a weakened moan. The dry leaves in the ditch simmered and boiled in the same breezes, a tongue of air occasionally ferreting a few, and sending them spinning across the grass. A group or two of the latest in date amongst the dead multitude had remained till this very mid-winter time on the twigs which bore them, and in falling rattled against the trunks with smart taps (FFMC, 11).

The echo from the Shelleyan subtext is undeniable, when one remembers these lines:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanted fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes (Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, stanza 1).

The romantic poet is expressing hope by referring to the cycle of seasons, and promising the renaissance of life in the ensuing spring. The wide scale of the point of view is expressed by “which art moving everywhere”, and the tiny scale of renewal is expressed by the image of the “winged seeds”. Indeed Troy’s romanticism, his hope that his betrayal of Fanny will be atoned for by spending Bathsheba’s money on a proper grave for the deserted young bride-to-be, is savagely brought to nought by “crass casualty” (H.C. Webster, p. 47), i.e. the gothic gargoyle’s spewing water like vomit (FFMC, p. 237-242: “the persistent torrent from the gurgoyle’s jaws directed all its vengeance into the grave”). Romantic certainty has been destroyed by the knowledge of Nature’s Immanent Will,

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expressed in laws such as the survival of the fittest, and natural selection. The subtext for such a scene lies in Darwin’s descriptions, as will be presently argued. As a result, while for the Romantics, Nature is something “love alone had wrought”, for Darwin it is ruled by the struggle for survival. For romantic poets, the survival of the best is a proof they deserve it, for Darwin it is the result of “hap”, i.e. accident. Again, the theistic and ethical belief in Nature’s beauty having been created for Man’s delight is replaced by the law of the preservation not of the good but of the species, within a mechanism of general search for progress. (H.C. Webster, p. 40-43) The elements in the novel express these views, as I shall try to argue.

Metaphors of the “madding” world In the novel, there are intimations of the oncoming industrialisation which involve the

transformation of man into a machine: the strongest metaphor of the submission of man’s to a regular mechanical automatism is the clock automaton in the church where Troy is waiting for Fanny. It is this inhuman regularity which brings about Fanny’s tragedy by arousing Troy’s hurt pride, and which is also underlined when Bathsheba uses her watch as a chronometer to measure Oak’s efficiency as a worker during the sheep-shearing episode (FFMC, chapter 22). In the film, the mechanical rhythm of automatons, suggesting the use of metronomes in music classes as well as science fiction films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), is transposed in two major clockwork metaphors.

The displacement of the church automaton in the film to the “domed musical carousel clock” as Roger Webster calls the piece (Wright, p. 29), also called a “clock-cum-music box with a revolving soldier-bugler” by Keith Wilson (Wright, p. 102) which Troy offers Bathsheba as a wedding present actually draws our attention to clocks throughout the film: there are a profusion of clocks in Boldwood’s dining room when he throws the Valentine into the fireplace where it slowly disintegrates, and Boldwood’s obsession with time whenever he harasses Bathsheba with dates for her engagement to him, is made to rhyme with the chiming of clocks. This form of punctuation by regular sounds is also used when Troy’s clock chimes away an epilogue to the film, as the camera zooms upon the small red figure blowing a silent trumpet. Despite the fact that the film later adds a non-diegetic lyrical, or romantic, “andante” rhythm in “Fanny’s ballad”, Troy’s prominent part in the general rhythm of the film is emphasized earlier in a near nuptial march rhythm during hymn singing in church; to the still military-minded Troy’s full satisfaction at his new power, he “marches” to the tune by the beat of his body.

The romantic scene in which Troy uses his sword-play to win Bathsheba’s love is an interesting mediation between the modern world of industrialization and the rural world under a threat of disappearance. Linguistically, the metaphors which he uses are taken from the rural world of field work, with sowing, reaping, and so forth. But his performance relies on numbers, mathematical precision (“within an inch of my life”, e.g.) and his steel sword which is like a razor is the product of industrialization: the use of fire, water, and iron in the production of steel. Just as Turner’s painting integrates the appearance of the steam engine amid natural elements in Rain, Steam, Speed,4 the use of the steel sword mediates

4. Turner too grounds his paintings upon the struggling opposite forces of elements, wind and water, mostly, in which steam and speed are not seen as contradictory with the elements, but rather as a transformation by the steam engine of the power of the elements into a human power. Turner is well known for his interest in atmospheric changes, and often frames a tiny human form at the centre of a storm (Hannibal crossing the

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man’s capacity to transform the energy of elements into power. The presence of electricity during the storm scene is yet another instance of such energy which appears on a huge scale in the sky but can be conducted and captured in tiny lamps (here more time would be needed for full development, but let us simply say that electricity is a widespread metaphor in the end of the 19th century).

The emblem of this major characteristic of the film’s changing rhythms is the use of agrarian machines, and the change in rhythm it introduces. In Schlesinger’s film, this is first used in a scene which is an addition to the novel: Boldwood introduces a steam threshing-machine to the remote arable districts of Wessex. As Simon Garrel notes5, he does not invite any women to work on it and also he apparently has not heard of the seed-drill that Farfrae some fifteen or twenty years earlier had recommended to Casterbridge. However it seems that the pounding of the machine introduces a rhythm which can be related symbolically in the film to Boldwood’s passionate heart; to quote Garrel again “this anachronism was suggested by Poorgrass’s song “I sowed the seeds of love” (loc.cit.).

This is indeed a startling change of rhythm in the film: in the first farm sequence, three close shots of the engine, and two medium shots allow us to enjoy the pulsating throb of the bright new green and red engine whose copper tubes shine in the sun, while Boldwood rides on top of it in a glorious posture, encouraging the men who have filed along the machine to take their share in its mechanical motions. Opposed to the unrelenting back and forth movement of the engine’s red jaws in front, vibrating throttle and steam expulsions, the scene of Boldwood and his men sowing the following years’ crops in rows is extremely backward in its rurality. In between we have also caught a glimpse of another engine, half modern by its yellow steel scythes mowing the crop but drawn by a horse team, not a power-engine, which is also the source of a rhythm, since it is immediately followed by the slowing down of all harvest work and Boldwood’s waiting for Bathsheba’s visit to keep her first promise, “by harvest time”. Symbolically, though, she has already, by then been, “cropped” by Troy’s searing scythe-like sword.

The visual rhythm of the narrative To such momentous changes in life rhythms the text adds another equally essential

change in rhythm, the visual rhythm of the narrative. Just to recall one vivid example, if the film carefully uses a “bird’s eye view” for Troy’s cavalry charges during his sword-exercise performance, it cuts abruptly to close-ups of the two protagonists’ faces, and the camera focuses on the caterpillar in a swift zoom. In a well-known passage from her book Darwin’s Plots, Gillian Beer quotes Darwin:

Wading birds *…+ are the greatest wanderers, and are occasionally found on the most remote and barren islands in the open ocean *…+ I took in February three table-spoonfuls of mud from three different points *…+ (228).

Alps, for example); the aporia of human figuration in his scenes (Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus for example) also contributes to the foregrounding of elements, essentially fire, wind, atmospheric clouds and downpour. When the earth is present, it is often reduced to a mere line for the horizon (Venice for example). The essential ambivalence of images allows the shift from the Romantic revolutionary dream to the Darwinian scientific statement for a viewer newly acquainted with a different understanding of man’s position amidst the elements. 5. Simon Garrel, in Wright, T.R. (ed.), Thomas Hardy on Screen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 49.

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Beer comments:

Darwin’s provisional explanation takes the form of a description with strongly imagined participating in the flight of the wading birds *…+ then the perspective changes suddenly from ranging mind’s-eye to the experimental observer (ibid).

The author then observes that the shift in scale of the description, from a large nearly planetary point of view, literally a “bird’s eye view” with the soaring of the bird crossing oceans, to a small detail held within one’s hand is a characteristic of Darwin’s description of both Nature and his eye on detail. The device found in Hardy is thus validated by the authority of a great author who influenced his understanding of reality to the point of atheism, and it is unsurprisingly transposed by him into a literary device. Just as Darwin “combines the domestic object of the breakfast cup of mud and the free space of the ocean-ranging birds” (Beer, p. 228), in FFMC Hardy combines the free space of the circular horizon and the cosmic movement of the planet among the constellations, and the small hut from which the tiny notes from Oak’s flute are heard :

To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement *…+ The tune *…+ came from the direction of a small dark object under the plantation hedge–a shepherd’s hut ( FFMC, 12-13).

Again in the description of Fanny’s arrival at the Barracks, the same shift from a bird’s eye view of the snowy landscape to her body as a tiny black spot uses the same contrast in scale :

On the right was a tract of land, partly meadow and partly moor, reaching, at its remote verge, to a wide undulating upland. *…+ the spot stopped, and dwindled smaller (FFMC, 69-70).

In addition to the chiasmus in the phonemes ([spt] versus [stp]) which underscores the alliterative effect as well as the assonance in [o], the description focuses on a small detail after having soared to a long distance overview of the surrounding upland.

Conclusion For Professor Beer, Darwin’s double focus on reality has to do with finding a new place

for man within the natural order:

*…+ his range of reference, his sense of lateral experience, finds a new place for man within the natural order, unnamed among many creatures *…+ (Beer, 228).

The novel’s central concern with elements focuses on a similar issue. From the point of view of my discussion here, Darwin’s scene is a striking combination of the elements: the bird unwittingly carries soil with a wide variety of seeds on its claws which it drops on another part of the earth, after crossing the seas by flying: earth, water and air are united

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in this narrative of evolution of species and sudden appearance of new plants in distant lands. That the description of the bird was used by Hardy in another novel in the description of a heron is well documented; but I see in these lines a metaphor of the elements which seems to me yet another way of reading them. And it is characteristic of both the aesthetics and the ethics of Hardy’s early and therefore seminal novel, Far from the Madding Crowd.6

R. COSTA de BEAUREGARD (Toulouse 3 Le Mirail)

6. Je remercie Elizabeth de Cacqueray de sa relecture précise de ces pages pour le bénéfice du lecteur.