the Oxford Movement theologians and their opponents. As a man he became more and more uneasy with innovations that were displacing rustic customs and with social ideas at variance with the older codes of life. He found evils aggravated by the intolerant judgment of society, as if there were not enough that are beyond human control and inherent in human life.
The most powerful of all the influences on Hardy, however, was the spirit of the age in which he lived. It was an age of transition, disturbing in itself for a sensitive mind. The old agricultural England was in the process of being devoured by the industrial development. Old ties were breaking and population was shifting from country to town. Hardy was not in any sense opposed to the world that was passing. The rural England to which he was attached by every tie of early, adolescent sentiment was crumbling before his eyes. It was really regrettable that what had seemed so secure was disappearing so irrevocably. Life seemed to Hardy to be precarious. By his novels, Hardy comes over as one who wanted to protect and preserve it. Moreover, he is in search of, “how people can develop a deeply intuitive relationship with their surroundings that can give meaning and purpose to their lives.”[1]
2.2 Hardy and Nature
To figure out what Nature means to Hardy; what Hardy says of Clym Yeobright, walking on Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native, might have been said of himself:
“If anyone knew the heath well, it was Clym. He was permeated with its scenes, with its substance, with its odors. He might be said to be its product. His eyes had first opened thereon; with its appearance all the first images of his memory were mingled; his estimate of life had been colored by it. His toys had been the flint knives and arrowheads which he found there, wondering why stones should “grow” to such odd shapes; his flowers the purple bells and yellow gorse; his animal kingdom the snakes and croppers; his society its human haunters.” [2]
Here we can find Hardy`s fervid love and respect towards Nature. In his Wessex novels, Hardy believes that “man is not belong to himself”, but part of Nature. This is embodied as the above.
Hardy`s perception of the world of Nature is very accurate; small details, like the buttercups which stain Bellwood’s boots as he walks through a field on a spring day, show us how wide-awake Hardy`s senses were to external impressions of Nature.
In addition, he is deeply interested in man’s relationship with his natural environment----in his case Wessex (actually Dorset). He believed strongly that man was a guardian of Nature and had a responsibility to look after the animal kingdom (like Gabriel Oak) and to pass it on undamaged to future generations. He always stresses that human should live in harmony with Nature. Like Wordsworth, he writes about men and women living in constant communion with Nature, shepherds, for example, tramps, or rural workers, and he feels that Nature provides these people with a permanent source of strength.
2.3 Hardy`s style
Hardy`s novels, all written before 1900, are Victorian novels. But they make at least three outstanding differences:
Firstly, Nature by Hardy, is not only used as a setting, but plays a vital part in the characters` life and the developing of the plots. Nature is a relenting determining order.
Secondly, Hardy`s novels are poetic. He fully utilizes his poetic talents in the descriptions of Nature. They incorporate the description of Nature into their thematic structures. “His language becomes poetic as he describes the beautiful dawn and spring days.”[3]
Thirdly, Hardy`s stories, by the setting of Nature he provided, are always moving and bewitching. “They touch hearts not so much by means of their plots (which are very good) as through the pathos of the emotional tangle.”[4] His structure is essentially an organism in which action is unified by his preoccupation with the conflict between man and Nature. All his heroes always have to fight a losing battle against an environment that is bent on ruining his aspirations in life. This conflict between man’s aspirations and his environment is the central unifying force of Hardy`s novels.
In a word, the description of Nature is characteristic of the style of Hardy`s Wessex novels.
3. Nature, character and fate
The following is an illustration of Hardy`s four tragic novels, one by one. The stories are all set in the fictional southern England region that Hardy named Wessex, and have become known as the “Wessex novels.” All these books have a lot of natural descriptions, which in turn exert a great influence on the characters and serve as a foil of the development of the plots.
3.1 The Return of the Native (1878)
The book’s title—The Return of the Native, gives readers the first indication of a close, and potentially disastrous, affinity of situation, event, and character. In t
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