[Boldwood] had no light and careless touches in his constitution, either for good or for evil. Stern in the outlines of action, mild in the details, he was serious throughout all. He saw no absurd sides to the follies of life, and thus, though not quite companionable in the eyes of merry men and scoffers, and those to whom all things show life as a jest, he was not intolerable to the earnest and those acquainted with grief. Being a man who read all the dramas of life seriously, if he failed to please when they were comedies, there was no frivolous treatment to reproach him for when they chanced to end tragically.
Nobody knew entirely; for though it was possible to form guesses concerning his wild capabilities from old floodmarks faintly visible, he had never been seen at the high tides which caused them.I finished Far From the Madding Crowd Sunday. Spoiler alert: Mr. Boldwood's "wild capabilities" surface. He murders Sgt. Troy at the book's climax, and uses the insanity defense to win a life sentence. Wasn't expecting the insanity defense.
The book ends, rapidly, just pages later, with our long-suffering, dutiful hero, Gabriel Oak, and Bathsheba Everdene marrying.
In the afterword, James Wright paraphrases Yvor Winters that "the language of Hardy's novels is often most beautiful when it is most like the language of his poems."
Then Wright quotes D.H.Lawrence: the "quality which Hardy shares with the great writers, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Tolstoi, this setting behind the small action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed nature; setting a smaller system of morality, the one grasped and formulated by the human consciousness within the vast, uncomprehended and incomprehensible morality of nature or of life itself..." Through Oak's "wise passiveness, the sorrows of Bathsheba are given their shape."
Like Oak, I want my protagonist to be both part of the "small action" as well as the "terrific action of unfathomed nature," and like Gabriel and Bathsheba, act morally in the face of the uncomprehended and incomprehensible.
Hardy's characters don't develop so much as mature, age in the face of new circumstances. They stay true to their personality. In my memoir I don't think any characters change. I'd been viewing this as a failure of the narrative--its dramatic arc. I'm more at peace with the revision process now. I've finished the rewrites of Aug/Sept/October--at least this pass.