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Culture and Environment: From Austen to Hardy

1999; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nlh.1999.0030

1080-661X

Jonathan Bate,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

Culture and Environment: From Austen to Hardy* Jonathan Bate (bio) And that will be England gone, The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, The guildhalls, the carved choirs. There'll be books; it will linger on In galleries; but all that remains For us will be concrete and tyres. Philip Larkin, "Going, Going" 1 At the end of the twentieth century, the two most popular English writers of the nineteenth century are Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. Year in, year out their books go on selling in paperback in quantities undreamed of by their modern-day successors. The agency which calculates the number of books borrowed from British libraries, for the purpose of paying the modest Public Lending Right fee to living authors, publishes a record of annual borrowings of dead authors: Austen and Hardy are consistently on top. In the United States, Austen's stock was massively inflated in the 1990s as the result of a series of highly successful film adaptations. What is the source of their enduring appeal? There is a cynical answer to this question, which could be summarized as frocks and smocks. Austen stands for a lost world of elegance, of empire-line dresses, of good manners, of ladylikeness and gentlemanliness in large and beautiful houses. Hardy, meanwhile, represents nostalgia for a simple, honest, rustic way of life among hedgerows, haystacks, and sturdy English oak trees. Together they stand for the imagined better life of both the higher and the lower classes in a world where there is no place for the motor car. They represent the spirit of Philip Larkin's England of shadows, meadows, and lanes that are gone. The cynic will say that nostalgia for the old southern shires is a [End Page 541] cultural disease. If that is so, then the popularity of Austen and Hardy suggests that our culture is in the grip of an epidemic. Our longing for the imagined health of the past must be a sign of the sickness of the present. Jane Austen went to the small medieval cathedral city of Winchester to die. To get there now you drive through the deep scar—it feels like a wound upon the very earth—which the motorway has cut through the ancient chalk downland of Twyford. Stand on Hardy's Egdon Heath and you will be deafened by the roar of low-flying Air Force jets, while far above the blue of the sky will be broken by the white ribbon of spent fuel that follows the jumbos on their flight-path into Heathrow. For Austen's characters and for Hardy's, a journey to the nearest town is an event, a trip to London an adventure. Now we can fly from London to New York in about the time it takes Hardy's Jude to get to Oxford. Already, though, in Hardy the possibilities of mobility are being opened up by the advent of the railway. His novels document rural customs of great antiquity even as they represent a world standing on the brink of modernity. We usually read his novels in the text which he revised for the Wessex edition of 1912, just two years before the first great war of technologically-engineered mass destruction. Born in 1840, the son and grandson of master stonemasons who performed in the band of the local parish church, Thomas Hardy died in 1928 with a knowledge of the automobile, the airplane, the gramophone record, and the radio. We may take a measure of the changes through which he lived if we contemplate the difference between two kinds of inscription. First, think of the words chiselled with slow care on stone by a master mason, words on a gravestone, let us say, which only disappear through the inexorable but imperceptible erosion of time and weather in the passing of—a phrase from one of Hardy's best poems—"the years, the years." 2 Then think of the values printed on a banknote in Weimar Germany or a stock market listing in Wall Street, 1929, inscriptions which lose their meaning almost before the ink is dry. Our instinct about Hardy is this: he values a world—for him vanishing, for us...