This body in which we journey across the isthmus between the two oceans is not a private carriage, but an omnibus.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1867) 

The previous chapter having supplied some background information on the state of the study of inheritance in the 1880s and 1890s, we turn finally to a fairly extended examination of Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (written 1873-5; published 1903) and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), two novels which profoundly illustrate the imaginative response to particular and, it may well be thought, highly recondite issues in contemporary theoretical biology. These works will bear such analysis, first, because their density of texture is very much greater than the relatively minor works of literary art so far examined; and, second, because both Butler and Hardy explored the imaginative possibilities of the life sciences most assiduously, with the dedication of men who somehow knew intuitively that there were facts, angles of looking at the world, and a possible precision of observation in those sciences unobtainable elsewhere.

At first sight Butler and Hardy have little enough in common either as personalities or as writers, and there is certainly no evidence that either was drawn to the other's work or would have found anything congenial there had he encountered it accidentally.¹ They were quite opposed in temperament: Butler naturally acerbic, contentious, his habitual mode of response deeply satirical, contemptuous of received wisdom and even of rationality itself, yet for all that of scholarly habits, an urban creature and the product of an urban education; Hardy placid, melancholiac, a thinskinned rebel whose instinct was to flee controversy, a rural autodidact whose over-reverence for abstractions severely lamed his art, an admirer of other men's rational creeds yet a thinker whose reflexes were basically poetic. Even the introversion which was their strongest shared feature manifested itself differently in each of them. Butler retreated into a small and rather barren private world beleaguered by largely imaginary enemies whence he emerged periodically to polemicise or shout abuse; his intercourse with other writers was practically non-existent; he was despised even by those scientists who in part shared his opinions; and he had nothing to learn from personal discussion. Hardy, by contrast, though shy, forced himself into fashionable London society and, because his role was purely that of a humble and interested layman and not therefore threatening, assimilated a good deal of biology direct. The two writers' outputs confirm these generalisations. Hardy the literary artist: fourteen novels, collections of short stories, and over 900 published poems - little else, however. Butler the man of letters: only one novel proper, a modicum of poor verse, a book on Shakespeare's sonnets, another on Homer, four on evolutionary theory, many miscellaneous essays, travel books and so on. Their relative successes in their profession is still more of a contrast. Before Butler died in 1902 he ruefully estimated his total profits from a lifetime's writing at £77 2s 11 I/2d. By this year Hardy had already completed his famous and lucrative career as a novelist, and he had another twenty-six years of life to make another reputation as a poet before dying very old and full of honours.

There are, however, other similarities. The most noteworthy is that of simple chronology. Butler was born in 1835, the year Darwin collected his critical data in the Galapagos Islands; Hardy in 1840, two years after Malthus had provided Darwin with the vital concept of population pressures: when the Origin was published Butler was 24, Hardy 19. The manhoods of both belonged to the first Darwinian generation and both breathed the air of biological controversy for much of their lives; both had a firm if slightly off-centre grasp of the essentials; and for both biology fertilised their art, though the offspring were divergent enough. And below the surface there were related reasons for their equal obsession with the mechanism of inheritance and hence for their responsiveness to every twist and turn of experiment and hypothesis. Hardy was philoprogenitive but childless, and he has a deep and gloomy interest in the history of his own family which he perceived to be one of devolution and decay. Even before the neo-Darwinian movement supplied him with a theoretical sub-structure of secular Calvinism he was already set towards genetic determinism. For Butler the secrets of heredity exercised a radically different spell. His wretched childhood and despicable parents (the probable unfairness of Butler's own version of this is irrelevant); his covert homosexuality and gross fear of women allied with a pathetic fascination for fatherhood objectified notably in Erewhon Revisited; his odd capacity for ancestor worship and hatred: these are the contradictory ingredients which were stewed together in the four 'evolution' books which are really four magical recipes for restructuring the image of a seIf. Whereas for Hardy the genetic endowment is just a strait waistcoat suppressing action, for Butler a grand personal exertion of will can burst those bonds and refashion the material into a seemly garment. He is profoundly optimistic about the individual's freedom to choose a destiny and melioristic in his attitude to the family organism - an entity in which he and Hardy together, deniers of resurrection within the Christian tradition, implant the only immortality they recognise.

The Way of All Flesh and Tess of the d'Urbervilles have a few broad similarities despite massive differences in structure and treatment. It is true that as aesthetic products they are hardly comparable. The latter after all is the masterwork of a novelist of genius, while the former is a highly uneven roman-a-clef which, as we shall see, was never properly revised. As a personality Hardy merges almost completely with his creation; so much so that some critics have argued that even his authorial interpolations are not uttered in his own voice but have only a contextual relevance amounting to a sort ofphilosphical negative capability. Butler by contrast forces himself - and his family - wholesale into a half-fictional work which would burst at the seams were it not pinned by such a firm temporal sequence as the intimate history of several successive generations. And, far from assimilating his extra-literary preoccupations and personal neuroses, the transparently authorial persona of Edward Overton allows him to indulge endlessly his undoubted gift for wittily pursuing tangential issues well beyond the rim of the immediate action. The result is lively enough, but the few superbly balanced comic scenes are too thinly studded across the pages of essayist's prose to make The Way exist for the reader as more than the sum of its parts.²

Still, at a deeper level the novels, like their authors, can be brought into some kind of contiguity. Both were written with the awareness of biological 'facts' very much in mind, though each author according to temperament bounded his horizons with a very different selection of those facts. Idiosyncratic though each selection may be, both try to resolve the obsessional problem of inheritance, and to this end we find a centripetal movement of plot in both Tess and The Way, with all the action bearing inward on the destinies of the heroine and hero. Tess and Ernest Overton share a curious mode of existence unusual in fiction though common enough in the heroic epic; that is, their being is extended for our inspection not in three but in four dimensions. Like the epical hero whose remote ancestry was linked with the divine, the heroes of these two novels have an extrapersonal augmentation. Tess's impersonal history stretches back to the Norman Conquest, and the family genotype (a concept that Hardy may have drawn directly from August Weismann) is presented as an active force within the surface 'present' of the novel; so much so, indeed, that the freedom of the protagonist is all but eroded away. Inside the frame of biological dialectics so vital to both novelists, The Way, though in fact written earlier, takes up Tess's highly deterministic conclusions and forces past them. Five generations of Pontifexes enter the story and a sixth is mentioned; these generations form a slice out of all human history (even, given Butler's extra-fictional preoccupations, out of all organic history), and the decay and restitution to health of that family organism is a drama whose unities are defiantly and perfectly deliberately set against those obdurate facts of genetics which so daunted Hardy as a philosopher.

Perhaps one can best summarise the root differences between the novels in terms of their respective attitudes to the individual consciousness. In certain moods and under certain influences Hardy toyed, as he does in Tess, with the mournful hypothesis that human consciousness, having been spawned in a blind world of defect, could be aware of nothing but pain and therefore that a lapse back into unawareness is the best service the cosmos can render to life. In his poems more often than in the novels Hardy becomes quite maudlin on this topic:

But the disease of feeling germed,

And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong;

Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed

How long, how long?³

Butler also had a poor view of cognition; for him it was the response of any organism to a sufficiently complex environment which habit had not yet allowed to be relegated to the instinctive mechanisms of behaviour. Under such duress 'consciousness springs into existence, as a spark from a horse's hoof;⁴ a spark, Butler taught, to be extinguished thankfully at the first opportunity, so that Ernest completes his development when he is able to stop trying. It may be seen that in this both Butler and Hardy reversed the ordinary conception of evolution (as we find it, for instance, in George Meredith) as life struggling into consciousness and, eventually, into self-awareness. Yet here we also have to hand a formulation of the differences between Ernest's career and Tess's. Butler has faith in the natural dispensation. For him, as for any Lamarckian, simply to be natural is to be fulfilled. Hardy, steeped in Darwinjan gloom, is deeply mistrustful of nature and contemptuous of its laws. In literary terms these viewpoints result in tragedy (Tess is unable to establish the rules of her selectionist universe until it is too late) versus farce (Ernest is a fool, but his teleological universe conspires to damp down the catastrophe resulting from his folly). And in psychological terms the difference of biological perspective partly explains why Tess in the end radiates pathos and Ernest a nasty priggishness.

Butler's Roles as Biological Theorist and Novelist Compared

Theorists may say what they like about. a man's children being a continuation of his own identity, but it will be generally found that those who talk in this way have no children of their own. Practical family men know better.⁵

For 'theorists' here, we can read the childless Butler himself and the views he had expounded in the 'evolution' books; 'practical family men' can be read as a jibe against the great majority who had cast aside Life and Habit and its successors as bad biology. This sly remark early on in the novel by its narrator Edward Overton is one of several which forces us to notice the extraordinary ambiguity of The Way as a dramatic rendition of a deviant late-Victorian biological theory of inheritance. As this quotation shows, the ambiguity does not rest with the meshing of theory with narrative, for Butler rides over that by boldly allowing his scientific preoccupations to float on the surface of the novel with only the most rudimentary attempt at aesthetic distancing. At work is the same impulse to realism which led Butler to impact his own life and his art by directly copying passages from his mother's personal letters into his text. By doing so he effectively circumvented any easy reading of the novel as rancorous autobiography. The interesting problems of interpretation and tone only emerge at the point where the personal becomes universal; where the roman-a-clef becomes the roman-a-these. The latter genre, however, is an inherently unstable one, tending to decompose under the bright critical gaze into simpler ingredients. So the ambiguity lies first in a clash of purpose, as scenes under exact dramatic control alternate with long and embarrassingly confiding miniature essays. And there is no doubt that in the earlier chapters particularly the reader responds to the moments of high comedy and to those almost exclusively. This is quite natural, since the emotional fulcrum there is Ernest's childhood, his upbringing in a high Victorian clerical family. It was this perceivedly loathsome experience which Butler allowed to fuse inside him until, when his heated memories had just sufficiently dissociated themselves from reality, he poured them forth in a long stream of satirical invective. When it is working properly The Way is, quite simply, a single sustained scream of hatred; and when Butler is moulding material from his own past - material which he can work up into his personal demonology - his sense of timing and of the apposite never falters. We are rewarded with Ernest's baptism using filtered Jordan water; with Dr Skinner's dining spiritually on bread and water but in crude actuality gorging himself on oysters; and with the engaged Theobold and Christina mournfully calculating their chances of glorious martyrdom. Such vignettes need threading firmly on a string of narrative provided by viewing the entire action through the consciousness of Overton, but this expedient does not prevent the splintering off of entire segments of Overton's monologue. He is too obviously Butler's mouthpiece, with his frustrations and obsessions protruding altogether too noticeably for him to be anything like a detached satirical observer of men's follies and crimes.

The Way of All Flesh, then, is most successful as picaresque comedy. But there is a second, more radical ambiguity in the presentation of the theoretical sub-structure of the novel which derives from Butler's vacillating attitude to the craft of fiction. Although he made spasmodic attempts to write 'a novel pure and simple with little "purpose"'⁶ he probably did see himself in the true light of a novelist manque, though his habitual pose of self-denigration makes it difficult to know just how seriously he felt his imaginative deficiencies. As he began to plan The Way he held Middlemarch before himself as a failure of unity and a disaster of inauthenticity, yet 'the only question is', he concludes his remarks on didacticism in the novel, 'whether, after all, that matters much'.⁷ For him it did not. Consequently The Way constantly induces in the reader a sense of strain, for he is invited and even compelled to respond in several modes simultaneously. Butler's inability to write, so to speak, in one dimension bedevils much of his prose and expresses itself here as a tendency to turn everything into fatuity and into an object of ironical observation, up to and including (as the opening quotation shows) his own deepest convictions. Almost despite himself he forces a mannequin's role on to Overton, garbing him disconcertingly now in jester's costume, now in professorial robes. The result can be dizzying. Consider Butler's analysis of George Pontifex, the self-educated and selfconscious tourist, at loose in Europe. The portrait, while the mode is securely ironic, is delicious. George's conventional ecstasies over the Alps, lush quattrocento art and sleeping in Napoleon's bed all serve to transfix him; but Butler is not content with merely anatomising his victim. He must stretch him out on the rack of time and theorise over him and over his line of ancestry. In those terms which throughout the novel provide his most potent metaphors and most suggestive analogies, George is a sport or mutated variation:

A very successful man, moreover, has something of the hybrid in him; he is a new animal, arising from the coming together of many unfamiliar elements and it is well known that the reproduction of abnormal growths, whether animal or vegetable, is irregular and not to be depended upon, even when they are not absolutely sterile. (p. 19)

Extracting this sentence from the elaborate context in which it appears partially masks the narrative's very noisy shift in gear at this point. When the reader is told that 'it is well known' the confidence of statement causes him to quieten his critical faculties and to take the biological fact without a quibble: that hybrids like mules are either sterile or don't breed true with successive generations. The reader is even willing, with a little prompting, to absorb the metaphorical transformation from businessman to hybrid. Given the quality of George's son, Theobald, it is not difficult to make the transference. The strain in the reader arises more from the question which insinuates itself between the words on the page and the characterisation to which they refer. How does Butler mean his bland utterances to be taken? Is it a proffered fact or is it (crudely) just a joke? And there is nothing in the novel to tell him. It is exactly this evasiveness which makes The Way of All Flesh so readable yet, ultimately, so profoundly unsatisfactory. We search for the high seriousness, for the solid moral concern which is so available in Tess at every point, but it is not to be found. Butler the anachronist is raising ingenuity, sheer playfulness, into the very subject-matter of art: he is foreshadowing Joyce and echoing Sterne while demanding from us spasmodically the response which we wish to reserve for George Eliot. There are too many clashing flavours in such a blend. To accept seriously a scientific patterning in a novel the reader first needs a reason to believe that his author believes in it.

And yet the most cogent fact on which any assessment of The Way as a novel of ideas must be built is that it was written in its entirety over eleven years (187 3-84) which also saw the writing and publication of Life and Habit (1877; dated 1878), Evolution, Old and New (1879) and Unconscious Memory (1880). Since, as we have seen, the theory of heredity sketched out in those books itself suffered considerable elaboration we must have before us the interlocking pattern of Butler's scientific and literary composition.

That Butler was considering a novel as his next literary project as early as April 1873 (only a year, that is to say, after publishing Erewhon and well before he engaged in any anti-Darwinian controversy) is clear from the extant correspondence with Charles Darwin and Eliza Mary Ann Savage. Though at first his plans were vague, he had written five chapters of a preliminary draft of The Way by September of that year. Unfortunately we have no contemporary details of the genesis of Butler's theory of heredity; but what we do have is the reconstruction of his train of thought written by himself about 1880 and eventually incorporated into Unconscious Memory as its second chapter. From this account it is plain that both the novel and the speculative investigation which in due course became Life and Habit had exactly the same starting-point; that is to say, a reconsideration of the problem of heredity. According to this account of 1880 the very first paragraph of Life and Habit was written in Montreal in June 1874. Part of the expression here - the assertion that 'it is one against legion when a creature tries to differ from his own past selves ... our former selves fight within us and wrangle for our possession'⁸ - suggests that Butler was already searching for some sort of intellectual structure to act as truss to the imaginative presentation of Ernest's ancestry in the first chapter of The Way already written. Once his 'very dry but exceedingly (to me) interesting subject. . .the force of habit'⁹ took a firm grip on him the novel was laid aside for several years; but when he did return to it in February 1878 he went ahead quickly in rough draft to get the ground covered, completing the second volume in some form - that is, up to Ernest's arrest for the assault on Miss Maitland - by July. Many revisions were made, very probably in the light of his adoption of Lamarckian inheritance; because if the analysis presented in the previous chapter is correct the evolutionary schema behind the first chapters of The Way of All Flesh must have been far less defined at first than in the finished state. The pattern of a creative bouleversement after a period in the front line of biological debate was repeated even more dramatically after the second and third interruptions caused by the writing of Evolution, Old and New (published early in 1879), and later of Unconscious Memory (published November 1880). When he began yet again in 1882, Claude Bissell's well-documented account tells us, 'all of the early material was rewritten, and what was intended to be merely the first draft of the concluding section was finished by the end of 1883';¹⁰ by November, to be exact, for Miss Savage had a complete manuscript in her hands by the 17th of that month. It was not, however, a manuscript which Butler was satisfied had reached publishable form. He was particularly dissatisfied with the ending, and his own evaluation rings true after a century: 'My own idea is that the first vol. is the best of the three, the second the next best, and the third the worst. . .I must begin again with the third volume.'¹¹ So the relentless process went on. As late as 1884 he was talking of restructuring the final volume, and he did add a lot of material before Eliza Savage's death on 22 February 1885. She had been his sole confidante and so effective a critic that the composition at times seems almost to have been a joint enterprise. For eighteen years after her death the manuscript gathered dust. Festing Jones's contention that Butler abandoned it rather than finished it is supported by the list ofaddenda he prints, including yet more corrections, many to be incorporated into the last episodes.¹² The rest of his life Butler devoted to a variety of other unpopular positions in literary and artistic controversies, but his creative impulse waned along with his determination to lay siege to the Darwinian stronghold. At some deep level in his nature they were indeed twin aspects of the same impulse.

But, if his scientific heterodoxy alone enabled him to write the novel he did, Butler trimmed all the excess fat from his theory so that it is not difficult to dissect out the four main arteries which carry the main flow of events in The Way. First, there is the oneness of personality between the four generations of parents and their offspring. We are required to accept, in strict literality, that Ernest is the same person as his father no less than his great-grandfather, and that their personalities are fully, though latently, part of his own. Heredity is memory: 'this feature of memory is manifested in heredity by the way in which offspring (e.g. Ernest) commonly resembles most its nearer ancestors (Theobald), but sometimes reverts to earlier ones (John Pontifex)'.¹³ But, second, if heredity is memory there must be a somatic equivalent to forgetfulness. The cumulative experience of past generations is available to the child only until he reaches the age when his parents conceived him; after that point he is thrown back on to his own resources. By the end of his life even his basal metabolism 'forgets' how to regulate itself - cellular repair fails because the body can no longer recall what healthy cells should be like. Forgetfulness, then, equals senescence; and amnesia, death. There is no more palpable evidence for the care with which Butler organised his novel than the very precise calendar that we are given to make this notion credible to the uninitiated reader - after he has done some simple calculations. John and Ruth Pontifex are both 38 in 1865 when their son George is born. Here the transmissibility of acquired characters is (within limitations) beneficial, for George has a chance in his adulthood as a successful publisher to 'recall' and apply the natural sagacity of his father and the assertiveness of his mother. George's son Theobald is born in 1802, when he is 37 and his wife 30; Ernest in turn is born in 1835 when Theobald is 33 and Christina 37. Butler devoted minute care to this chronology, altering the relevant ages many times, and this may not represent his full and final intention; but the progressive decline in male ages also marks a progressive diminution in inheritable wisdom. It puts some structure into Ernest's loss of direction, after his leaving Cambridge and his hasty ordination have thrown him so far out of equilibrium that his emergent individualism is 'nipped as though by a late frost' (p. 201) - one of several horticultural similes used in this context.

The third and fourth core biological principles may be summarily stated here since their artistic significance emerges only under closer analysis. One is that habit-memories are normally latent in each individual, and can be roused from dormancy only by environmental shock or (Butler's own idiosyncratic term for it) 'crossing'. Providing these shocks are not violent enough to damage or destroy the organism altogether, their effect can be beneficial. Presumably 'crossing' is analogous to the hardening-off process used on tomatoes to prepare them for a cool climate. The other principle is that the highest evolutionary ideal is not an intensification of consciousness but, rather, its replacement by 'grace' - a manifold virtue which encapsulates all of Butler's Hellenism, his antipathy to Pauline Christianity and his admiration for instinctive physical excellence and social poise in young men. In The Way the aureole of grace surrounds, of all Ernest's contemporaries, only Towneley; and in Ernest's self-lacerating description of him we note for the first time one of those odd transpositions from society to biology habitual with Butler. 'To make Towneleys,' Ernest lectures Overton after doing his six months' imprisonment with hard labour, 'there must be hewers of wood and drawers of water - men in fact through whom conscious knowledge must pass before it can reach those who can apply it gracefully and instinctively like the Towneleys can' (p. 287). Here he does not mean, as one ignorant of Butler's biology might well suppose, that Towneleys are part of an aristocratic elite and flourish only in climates of inequality. It is not a political statement at all. Ernest is a hewer and a drawer simply because the life-force must periodically become aware of itself before relapsing into blessed instinctiveness; because Ernest must struggle after virtue and invent his personality as he proceeds.

For this reason the study of Ernest as a Lamarckian hero lacks definition, as his biography continually merges with that of the Pontifexes of which he is a transient and none-too-successful component. Ernest's name itself carries some extra meaning in this context. It has a semi-allegorical significance. The family surname has often been taken as a pointer to the Catholic priesthood, though the priestly connections of the Pontifex family (limited anyway to Ernest and Theobald) makes this a feeble pun.¹⁴ A more likely possibility, in view of Butler's interests, is that 'Pontifex' echoes biological nomenclature (cf. spinifex, tubifex) to remind us, by reference to such simple forms of life, of the living and environmentally sensitive family organism which transcends its members and is effectively immortal. The derivation of the '-fex' suffix then gives us Ernest 'the bridgemaker' - the means by which the Pontifex creature reaches into the future across five generations linking the two ends of the family to restore its own health in the incarnation of Ernest's children. The hero's Christian name, of course, tells his fate. As for the title, one meaning is ironic. Butler's theory repudiates the biblical admonishment that dissolution is the fate of all life. But equally the novel goes on to show the way - the method, the technique - by which life extends itself over time. If these interpretations are correct, we can make sense in terms of the novel of Butler's summary disposal of the notion of personal identity as irresolvable unity. He spoke instead of the personality as being 'a nebulous and indefinable aggregation of many component parts which war not a little among themselves. . .nothing but fusion and confusion'.¹⁵ His description does not in fact add much to the classic demolition job by Hume, except that it substitutes a genetic flow for Hume's stream of mental impressions; but as an article of belief of a novelist it certainly does not help towards the construction of characters of Dickensian solidity. A caveat is in order here. Butler's literary perceptions are in no way similar to, say, Virginia Woolf's, and he was not interested in impressionist techniques. He does not, so to say, inspect his creations through a lens of such resolving power that the commonplace causal bonds of motivation and action fade into indeterminacy. The fuzziness of The Way of All Flesh arises rather from filtering a realist's perceptions through a speculative hypothesis (whose truth or falsity is not in question) which simply does not make for good novels, or at least for the good Bildungsroman which Butler hoped to make of The Way. Ernest's passivity is pressed upon him directly by his creator's vision of personal development: the vision that happiness consists, not in modifying one's surroundings to suit, but in camouflaging oneself and vanishing into them; not in discovering one's duty to the world and acting it out, but rather in seeking out an ambiguous 'inheritance'. The amoeboid Ernest's sole reflex is to shrink from hostility; or, in extremis, to envelop himself in a tough cyst of unearned income and social abnegation. Still, we do Butler an injustice if we blur his distinction between the illusory sense of personal identity and the person as a whole, for he is careful never to do so. Though he impresses on the reader the evanescence of every person, the logic of his position equally requires that the representatives of each generation be apotheosised. For in each Lamarckian generation each person bodies forth the total experience of his forebears and even of the totality of life itself; for he is in truth frighteningly free, almost in the existentialist sense of being forced to raise himself by his own moral bootstraps. The Lamarckian hero can choose to ignore his freedom if he wishes, or (like Theobald Pontifex) the ignorance can be his portion by sheer pressure of circumstances; but that permanent and progressive degradation of humanity, that utter impotence and futility of human striving so in the background of Tess, is impossible. A Lamarckian tragedy is a contradiction in terms. Though its intensity may brighten or dim as the generations pass, the course of life is always a movement into further evolutionary complexity.

The Way of AH Flesh as a Lamarckian Novel of Inheritance

As soon as we move from the complexities of Life and Habit intoThe Way of All Flesh itself we are forcibly made aware that, from artistic necessity, the fictional events deviate a good deal from the abstractions of the 'evolution' books. To put this another way, on entering the novel we discover that Butler's real interests, partially concealed under the movement of the more rigorous argument, now become overt, displacing any material which cannot be squeezed into narrative order. Besides introducing the occasional deus ex machina to solve some exigency of the plot (a blatant example is the one which nullifies Ernest's bigamous marriage), Butler brings into close focus just a tiny segment of his overall account of organic development. For his biology books ostensibly cover a vast span of geological aeons no less than does the Origin; indeed, he goes farther than Darwin in imputing a kind of memory-consciousness and hence a potential for development even to inorganic matter. It is no part of his theory that a few generations could reveal Lamarckian, any more than Darwinian, effects. (Except, possibly, the transmission of simple injuries: Butler knew of Charles Brown-Sequard's experiments which suggested that such transmission did sometimes occur from parent to child, but he attached no special significance to them.) Yet in the novel we are required to believe that the Pontifexes in five generations show such a transparent regression and advance that a single observer can easily remark them. If Lamarckian inheritance really did improve the human stock at such a rate, we would have touched perfection long since. No; Butler like any other novelist concerns himself with psychological, not biological truths and to this end devotes the bulk of his novel to an account of Ernest's education, which is a paradigm of orthogenesis at work. In his hero's struggles to remake himself, in his blind groping towards a consummation which only gains in reality with each step on the way, we are meant to read the trend of all life. We are explicitly guided to such a reading by Overton's generalisation that 'embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape' (p. 207) - an analogy which, like many served up throughout the novel, sounds impressive until we reflect that the outcome of embryological recapitulation is determined and that it always moves towards a goal of structural completion which is pre-set. By contrast personal and (by definition) Lamarckian organic evolution, though goal-seeking, is an open-ended process without any inbuilt destination, and certainly no 'final shape'. Butler has betrayed himself with an analogy which blunts his intention. But perhaps it was intentional that, by giving Overton the role of benign and detached cartographer of his creator's aprioristic theory, some distortions had to be introduced. The point at issue is that The Way runs by its own logic, and that that logic quite frequently defies the simple and direct correspondence taken for granted by R.A. Streatfeild and others.¹⁶ To read the novel this way would land us in a morass of contradictions. Some of these do exist anyway and are genuinely irresolvable; but others may be minimised by keeping Butler's biology before us as an imaginative projection, as a complicated system of tropes useful and important only for ordering the material of the novel, for defining the roles of the generations and for setting the relations between them. To do more than this means to enter the narrative itself.

The opening portrait of John Pontifex strikes a note that, by reason of its rarity among the rather limited range of effects Butler's art is capable of, sounds almost grotesque. It is that of unfeigned, wholly non-ironic approval. Old Pontifex measures up in every way to an evolutionary ideal of unconscious grace which, thanks to the intromission of his bossy wife's genetic factors, so eludes the next few generations of Pontifexes. What is more, the portrait has charm and a quiet persuasiveness, and does not alienate the reader as does that of old John's urban equivalent, Towneley. It is a portrait done from a distance in soft pastel shades, yet John is still very much the exemplar of Butler's views. He is unconsciously adapted to his narrow rural life, just as he is unconsciously an adept in his supremely practical skills of master carpenter, artist and musician. Though starting in life 'with no other capital than his good sense and good constitution' (p. 4) - and here Butler deliberately conjoins two meanings of 'capital' to show, as he does throughout, that they are identical - he has constructed a balanced and harmonious life as instinctively as he constructed his two organs (not to mention, of course, his own inner organs): without blueprint, plan or design. He rests at the centre of his Paleham house like a chambered nautilus in its complex and beautiful shell. He is unconscious even of his own reproductive capacities. Neither he nor his wife take parenthood more seriously than do the lower mammals, and indeed they do their best to emulate them by apprenticing George off to his uncle at the first opportunity, so falling, as Overton's narrative puts it with unconcealed approval, 'into their proper places, resigning all appearance of a parental control, for which, indeed, there was no kind of necessity' (p. 9). Like many more of Overton's good-humoured asides, this on parenthood prefigures Ernest's experience much later. By that time, however, all humour has been boiled off by hatred:

A man first quarrels with his father about three-quarters of a year before he is born. It is then he insists on setting up a separate establishment. When this has been once agreed to, the more complete the separation forever after the better for both. (p. 305)

The sourness of this and its emptiness of any warmth save the heat of disgust make it difficult to appreciate that old John Pontifex has been moved by the light of nature to behave in much the same fashion. Is Butler here exploring the Oedipal situation? If we grant him so much, we should take note that he is manipulating the raw material of one science - namely developmental psychology, which did not then exist as a coherent study - within the quite misapplied conceptual framework of another, genetics. This is a recognisable quirk of Butler's reasoning, evident in many places outside the novel. For instance: 'if the mere anxiety connected with an illhealing wound', he questions rhetorically in 'Deadlock in Darwinism', 'is sometimes found to have so impressed the germ-cells that they hand down its scars to offspring, how much more shall not anxieties that have directed actions of all kinds from birth to death. . .modify and indeed control, the organization of every species?' (p. 44: my italics). Here the extrapolation is an obvious one: Butler is twisting information on the alleged transmissibility of mutilations into a totally suppositious claim for the inheritance of psychic damage, simply because he has an emotional stake in the latter. Such transpositions figure very largely in The Way of AlI Flesh.

As a sophisticated product of the evolutionary process, John Pontifex is a finely balanced individual who is specially vulnerable to the grossness and fierce assertiveness in his son's nature. George Pontifex is, by comparison with his father, a failure, though he continues to be very well adapted to his new social environment. His transplantation from the rural scene to London does, it is true, reinforce his 'trifle too great readiness at book learning' (p. 8), but the disastrous consequences of this take another generation fully to materialise. George's chief claim to goodness is that he escapes poverty completely. Butler professed to be uninterested in the saintly virtues, insisting instead on the synonymity of the good of the individual and society. In this brand of utilitarianism there is to be seen yet another transition from biology into, this time, economics: if society is indeed a single organism, or one great polyp, then the reward for private virtue is going to be expressed, typically, in money terms. Poverty, then, is a natural crime - a proof of evolutionary failure. The poor are the unfit to survive. Lamarckian social morality has brought us back, by a different route, to the Darwinian imperatives. The difference is that for Butler there are winners, and the winners are those whose wills are equal to the burden of evolutionary advancement. George Pontifex is still one of the elect, as is proved by his dying rich and respected at 73.

The next incarnation of the Pontifexes, Theobald, marks the nadir in the devolution of the family organism. Instead of inheriting his father's strong camouflaging abilities, Theobald proves to be as meekly passive as old John. But, worse, we see him torn out of the Paleham setting and cursed by an education which strips away his meagre ration of instinctive wisdom even as it raises him into miserable self-awareness. The free part of him is forced into abeyance yet farther, as it is distorted more and more by the powerful wills of the Aliaby family and his father until he is plunged into a hell of personal inauthenticity. Some of the scenes conveying this are richly comic ones - the passage of letters between Theobald and George before the former's ordination; the neatly timed one where the Miss Allabys settle Theobald's marital future with a hand of whist - though as usual the humour here is superficially innocent of all theory.¹⁷ It wells up instead from Butler's only fount of literary creativity, the inexpungible hatred of his father. But we are never permitted to laugh with Theobald, only at him, and the lasting impression is one of grey despair. There is for a short while at this point in the novel a revelation of what exactly Butler meant when he said that Darwinism filled him with loathing, for Theobald has to bear the brunt of surviving in a blackly Darwinian world of random events untransfigured by the chance of personal striving to grow. The mood of Tess momentarily breaks through as Theobald, locked in his uncongenial life, is seen 'trudging through muddy lanes and over long sweeps of ploverhaunted pastures to visit a dying cottager'. Going about his distasteful pastoral duties he sinks into a dreadful spiritual exhaustion, almost asphyxiated by being cut off from his oxygenating past identities; for 'what does a fish's best come to when the fish is out of water?' (pp. 58-9). Overton's judgement on him is stern - stern with the conviction that Theobald is no pawn of circumstances but a free moral being who has repudiated his sacred genetic obligations, who has flinched away from the stimulating 'crossings' which might have forced him to put out new shoots. Instead Theobald fails on both levels of being, cerebral and instinctual alike:

The habit of not admitting things to himseIf has become a confirmed one with him. Nevertheless there haunts him an iII-defined sense that life would be pleasanter if there were no sick sinners, or if they would at any rate face an eternity of torture with more indifference. He does not feel that he is in his element. The farmers look as if they were in their element. They are full-bodied, healthy and contented; but between him and them is a great gulf fixed (p. 60)

- and that is the gulf of arduous intellectual training which has effectively destroyed Theobald as a man. His sole emotional outlet is the sadistic training he inflicts on Ernest to make him the same kind of failure, almost as if inherited decay once set in motion is self-perpetuating. Here there is neither room nor occasion to examine the account of Ernest's grim childhood in detail; it must suffice to say that the whole upbringing, though in essence autobiographical, is arranged to support Life and Habit's dictum that birth 'is commonly considered as the point at which we begin to live. More truly it is the point at which we leave off knowing how to live.'¹⁸ While in the womb the embryonic Ernest constructed a neat and efficient body-shell for himself; but the young adult Ernest, cast into the world as a London clergyman, finds his lack of real biological wisdom has at first absurd and then calamitous results. This is adumbrated in the small and light scene of Ernest as a curate preaching on the barren fig-tree, making the botanical mistake that fig-trees show their blossom (pp. 233-4); it is fully realised in the black comedy of Ernest's failure to detect the critical difference between the Misses Maitland and Snow; and it is finally pressed home in the magistrate's sentencing address - one of the most beautifully controlled examples of Butler's reliance on speech cadences to convey irony.

Ernest's fall from grace into prison is no smooth decline. For a time in his boyhood while under the careful ministration of his Aunt Alethaea, Ernest is able to turn back with relief to his latent identity as Old John, and he starts to exercise his 'muscle' of practicality by constructing in his turn another wooden organ. Personal evolution, no less than organic, is growth, change and development. While Butler's handling of Ernest's imprisonment must strike every reader as absurdly unrealistic,¹⁹ this is certainly the crisis of his hero's life and the climax of the novel. It is not surprising that here, too, is revealed most distinctly Butler's deviation from orthodoxy over the evolutionary significance of the potency of the individual will. Since for a Darwinian each separate organism is entirely a product, first of a random permutation from among a near-infinite number of genetic variables, and then of an environment which moulds its behaviour, he must believe that when put under stress the organism can do nothing but die and clear the field for the better-adapted. As a neo-Darwinian by deepest conviction Hardy explores these axioms with almost frightening intensity in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. But The Way of All Flesh, as a neo-Lamarckian novel, does nothing if not extol the powers of the blindly groping will. Of course Ernest is a wretched creature with both an unstable ancestry and a miserable home life bearing down on him - things he shares with Hardy's heroine - yet for all that there is also what he chooses to do with his nature and nurture. It naturally does not follow that Ernest's choices are all fully aware ones. One success of the novel is that it does dramatise semi-conscious impulses which help to mould a destiny. But the overall impression is of freedom, not of determinism.²⁰ If the game were being played out to Weismannian rules, Ernest would succumb; instead he resists and struggles to remake himself into something nearer society's desire not his own heart's, for that is a luxury permitted only in a tragedy or a romance, and Ernest is neither a tragic nor a romantic hero.

Overton's admonition -

if a man is to enter into the kingdom of heaven he must do so not only as a little child but as a little embryo, or rather as a little zoosperm and not only this but as one that has come of zoosperms who have entered into the kingdom of heaven before him for many generations. Accidents which occur for the first time and belong to the period since a man's last birth are not as a general rule so permanent in their effects (p. 241)

- is really an impossibility proposed for rhetoric's sake, just as its biblical source is. Ernest, no more than Nicodemus, cannot enter again into his mother's womb or reselect his genetic inheritance; so as he rises into health under the stimulus of the drastic 'cross' of prison and insolvency he chooses the next best alternative of regressing economically - digging down to social bedrock and anchoring himself to it by marrying the former scullery-maid Ellen and opening an old clothes shop in the East End. But Ernest, though a successful shopman, is not destined to remain one. 'Nature is eminently conservative,' wrote Butler in that last essay of which almost every sentence has a pointed reference to the novel, 'and fixity of type, even under considerable change of conditions, is surely more important for the wellbeing of any species than an over-ready power of adaptation to, it may be, passing changes' ('Deadlock in Darwinism', p. 45). Ernest's circumstances of poverty are just such 'passing changes'. Learning to be rich, to manipulate wealth, is his final adaptation, for his great expectations are his most decisive inheritance. Significantly, in view of what has been said already, the point where those expectations are fulfilled is just the point from which the novel rapidly decays as Butler's own obsessions become progressively less tinctured with wit, rapid action and sheer intellectual elan. At first the injury is not too serious. While Butler, via Overton, treats the financial pretensions of his hero with his customary blend of cynicism and quasi-scientific detachment ('A man can stand being told that he must submit to a severe surgical operation. . .but the strongest quail before financial ruin': p. 251), all remains well. It is only when the tone becomes heavy and preachy, redolent with confiding Butlerism, that the reader's aesthetic distancing collapses as he becomes aware that he has stumbled into quite a different book. Once again we have to rummage in Life and Habit to explicate the exact degree of failure. In a most ingenious paragraph, Butler there compares with deadly seriousness the slow accumulation of human capital investment over the centuries with the gradual improvement of organic function. As it is with men,

so with the limbs and instincts of animals; these are but the things they have made or bought with their money, or with money that has been left them by their forefathers, which, though it is neither silver nor gold, but faith and protoplasm only, is good money and capital notwithstanding .²¹

About halfway through this gallimaufry, and reading back into the novel, we realise that it is really the converse proposition which interests Butler; that having money is itself a sign of evolutionary grace. To become rich, whether by personal effort or by inheritance (and, if we assume the identicality of the generations, living on inherited money, far from being parasitical, is the reward for the efforts 'you' have made in the shape of your parents or remoter ancestors), is to be signalled as naturally acceptable.

In a late essay he pushes even this oddity forward to the stage where he is saying that those people who are not highly organised enough (he means, not rich enough) to have 'grown' a solicitor or banker can generally repair any loss to their integration as freely as lizards grow new tails.²² So Ernest, in poverty, regenerates himself as a shopkeeper; later, burdened by a large fortune, the failure of his bank, we are to suppose, would be as fatal as a coronary thrombosis! It is easy to mock this kind of absurd transposition of facts, where Butler's irony turns back and rends itself to pieces; it is easy and accurate to remark that the obsession with money and its powers revealed here is almost pathological. The Way, says Claude Bissell, 'is a study of the redemptive powers of the unconscious. But it might also be defined as a study of the redemptive powers of money' ('A Study', p. 166). 'Redemptive': exactly. Given the imaginative identification of financial and biological inheritance, and given that the latter is often defective and maiming (for Ernest, for Butler himself), the logic of the novel looks to the first to rectify the maladroitness of the second. And this in turn stands behind such artistically and morally obtuse scenes as Ernest's confrontation with his father as his mother lies dying. Theobald notices that Ernest looks healthy and affluent:

here he was swaggering in grey Ulster and blue and white knecktie, and looking better than Theobald had ever seen him in his life. It was unprincipled . . .

Ernest saw what was passing through his father's mind and felt that he ought to have prepared him in some way for what he now saw. . . He put out his hand and said laughingly, 'Oh it's all paid for I am afraid you do not know that Mr. Overton has handed over to me Aunt Alethaea's money.' Theobald flushed scarlet ... (p. 231)

Amid such scenes as these the intellectual force and delight of The Way are squandered to the point where Malcolm Muggeridge's castigation of it as one of the most ignoble novels ever written strongly advocates itself. Why are Ernest's jeering here at his ailing parents and several comparable scenes in the third volume so inexpressibly vulgar? Not inherently because of the petty-mindedness they expose beneath the carefully fashioned biological conceptions which supposedly vindicate them. The failure is not ideational, but artistic. Such scenes are etiolated because they don't work; because they are imposed on characters whose consistency of behaviour has quite suddenly become suspect. We don't believe Ernest fosters out his children to a family of bargees so they may grow uninhibitedly into fresh John Pontifexes unable to give any account of their deepest convictions. Ernest does it - Butler has him do it - for the same reason that he is laden with unearned income before the last chapter: to make him free, to deliver him from the tomfooleries of the social pecking order because, finally, he is selfish. All these inadequacies centre most disconcertingly on Towneley, the supreme figure of instinctive savoir-faire who hovers elegantly on Ernest's horizons as the archetype of successful adaptation. Now, while Butler relates the changing fortunes of the Pontifexes we are temporarily inveigled into considering heredity as persisting intergenerational habits. While Ernest is exposed to the Battersby atmosphere of claustrophobic torment we welcome being told with supportive examples from natural history that filial hatred is natural. But at no point whatsoever is Towneley made appealing as the apex of the evolutionary pyramid, the man who has transcended the makeshift of brains to live graciously in unself-consciousness. He is incredible because the reader is being clumsily manipulated, being tugged into a web of neurosis that he cannot sympathise with because the facts, of which homosexual attraction is the key one, are not to hand.²³ Useful here is P.N. Furbank, who in what remains the sharpest short critical study of Butler offers the most valuable and succinct generalisation that 'however distant a (scientific) notion starts in this writing, it is attracted towards the emotional centre' (Samuel Butler, p. 17) - and in being sucked into the vortex, we might supplement Furbank, it is transmuted into imitation biology. This works no less for Butler's own contributions than for facts which he extracted from other sources; and as it is the basic process by which Butler's creative imagination fuelled itself it is worth looking at a pair of examples more closely.

One noteworthy case where Butler's grasp of his own biological notions suffers analogical transformation in the novel is his use of his own original explanation for the consequences of breeding hybrid organisms, a tactic commonly called 'crossing'. His account (Life and Habit, pp. 141-8) is conventional enough even in its inconclusiveness, as he wrestles with the problems of interspecies sterility (which could not be resolved without a knowledge of Mendelian genetics), and also in its prejudice, as he comments on the wickedness of half-castes. His own explanation for hybrid sterility is that it is caused by too strong a conflict between the 'memories' provided by each parent; that the hybrid is rendered sexually ineffective by being 'pulled hither and thither by two conflicting memories or advices' (p. 141). Still, provided we make full allowance for Butlet's use of the term, 'crossing' conforms well enough with such standard usages as Darwin's: that is to say, the intermingling of the characteristics of two different strains. But in The Way we are confronted with examples of crossing which have nothing at all to do with the breeding of hybrids. By some labyrinthine analogical process the technical word apparently acquires the extra and more familiar meaning of thwarting, or opposing, or going counter to. Butler lets the term escape from stockbreeding into the arena of the interaction between the individual and his environment, and makes it a key to a full understanding of Ernest's slow rise to full spiritual health. We are required to see his early experiences as having'been altogether too great a cross, so that it is not until his imprisonment that the native powers of resistance inherited from his great-grandfather rise from supinity; and it is not until the dissolution of his marriage that Ernest is struck down with that 'relief from tension' which only the advice of the psychiatrist (yet another Butler persona) alleviates. He tells Overton of the urgent medical need to 'cross him':

Crossing is the great medical discovery of the age. Shake him out of himself by shaking something else into him. . .

Seeing is a mode of touching, touching is a mode of feeding, feeding is a mode of assimilation, assimilation is a mode of re-creation and reproduction and this is crossing - shaking yourself into something else and something else into you.

He spoke laughingly but it was plain he was serious. (p. 306)

And he goes on to make his prescription of 'a course of the larger mammals' at the zoo; Ernest is enjoined, however, to leave the Simiae alone: 'the monkeys are not a wide enough cross; they do not stimulate sufficiently'. A little later Ernest is seen sauntering round the elephant-house 'drinking in large draughts of their lives to the re-creation and regeneration of his own' (pp. 306-8). This little episode within eight chapters of the end is clearly to balance out the violent crosses that Ernest has earlier suffered, and again raises the perennial problem of tone. Is it anything more than diverting? To the majority of readers, innocent of Butler's theory of interspecies mnemonic continuity, probably not. Even to the rare reader with Life and Habit at the fingertips, such a metaphorical transition (from 'cross' equals hybrid, to 'cross' equals therapeutic opposition, almost psychotherapy), far from taking a biological theory and welding it to mundane life, rather plays fast and loose with it.

A second example of the extension of Furbank's point shows more clearly the deforming of fact under emotional pressure, since it begins with facts in the public realm. Towards the end of Life and Habit (ch. 11) Butler draws extensively on Theodule Ribot's L 'Heredite and on Sydney Smith to supply him with facts about instinctive behaviour which he can propose in turn as examples of inherited memory. For a whole page he quotes Smith on the habits of the sphex wasp which, laying its eggs alongside the bodies of previously paralysed insects, guarantees its grubs a food supply when they hatch after their parents' death. This is only one supportive case among many piled up in this chapter, and Butler has little difficulty in preserving his scholar's pose of detached demonstration. Early in The Way of All Flesh, however - it is a tempting but unprovable supposition that the two passages were written close together - exactly the same facts are placed into a context which is far more than merely descriptive.

Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before. (p. 71)

The locus here is the senile grumblings of George Pontifex after his godson's christening party and, while entertaining, is an acid enough comment on filial obligation. Perhaps its saving grace resides in its hovering hesitantly between the poles of simple wit, irony and velleity without gravitating to any one of these, which would force the reader into making a decisive judgement about it. Because he can remain aloof he can simply enjoy. But Butler has not drained dry his metaphor. Moving on thirty chapters we come across this:

He was big and very handsome ... very good natured, singularly free from conceit, not clever, but very sensible, and lastly his father and mother had been drowned by the overturning of a boat when he was only two years old and had left him as their only child and heir to one of the finest estates in the South of England. (p. 188)

Here there can be no multivalence and no highly wrought irony. For to read this critical passage as ironic, where Butler is zealously soliciting our admiration, necessitates reading the whole novel as an exercise in Menippean satire or as a kaleidoscope of value patterns. And the entire didactic purpose of The Way militates against this; the ending, for instance, when Overton, Towneley and Ernest almost merge into a single personality, may be inept and morally repugnant, but it genuinely is an ending within the Victorian ethos of novel-writing. What we do have here is the familiar grasping at the reader's sleeve; we have Butler doing more than finding correlatives for the emotional wounding of his childhood; we have an elevation of this hatred into a bogus ethical deduction from biological fact: that it is natural to hate your parents and therefore that it is right. This bounding from is to ought must by this time ring familiarly. Instead of the superbly daring iconoclast pitching out all the flaccid Victorian proscriptions, we are startlingly confronted with a regression, a harking back to the Darwinian moralists of the 1860s and 1870s, who too hastily defined human conduct in terms of the survival of the fittest. Through the oddities of its composition The Way of All Flesh (and this goes for the evolution books as well) all leapfrog T.H. Huxley's admonition about evolutionary ethics and reveal that their fundamental suppositions are those of their originator's youth and of the culture that nourished that youth.

Butler and Heredity Summarised

The conclusion to which the foregoing reading tends is that after a little probing all of Butler's literary and scientific reflexes stand revealed as middle and late Victorian. Despite his superficial modernity he even gives The Way the conventional structure of three volumes and a happy ending. Ernest himself, to be sure, has attributes of the 'modern' hero in his isolation, his often pathetic yet obdurate reliance on his experience alone, his deracination both personal and cultural, even his inconclusive destiny: these things are his inheritance, just as they are for Stephen Dedalus or Camus' Meursault. It is to be observed, though, that one can make such claims for the seminality of this novel without any reference to past or present biology. The mould into which Butler poured his otherwise ungovernable feelings may at last, its purpose served, be broken and thrown away. And that is the most severe critical judgement one can pass on The Way of All Flesh; but it is not from the present perspective a wholly destructive judgement, for the novel still remains open to us as a supreme product of intellectual conflict. Other authors of the last century used biological notions to creative ends, but no one other than Butler first established with such relentless exactitude his position with respect to Darwinism proper. Others satisfied themselves with a little carping at the natural selection mechanism and with a refusal to believe (for not very good reasons other than those sanctioned by emotion) that this factor alone made for evolutionary advance. W.H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies and most of the other writers who looked at the matter at all took this stance. A few others - by temperament stoical - uncritically allowed Darwinism to confirm their reading of life: Meredith and Hardy. The peculiar interest of Butler is that one can see in fascinating detail the two usually opposing halves of a sensibility - the imaginative and the cognitive - here marching very closely in step, each sharing the often profound adequacies and inadequacies of the other. For, as we have seen, Butler certainly did not work out a philosophy and then write a novel around it - the sequence of events which gives Hardy's Tess its richness of mature and accomplished insight. Instead, a fresh idea about heredity was for Butler an artistic experience modifying his sensibility as novelist; and reading his novel we are in the presence of an almost Metaphysical mind in perpetual and energetic motion.

Tess and the Darwinian Motif

Prof. Huxley once compared life to a game of chess played by man against an enemy, invisible, relentless, wresting every terror and every accident to his own advantage. Some such idea must have influenced Mr Hardy in his narrative of the fortunes of Tess Durbeyfield.²⁴

So began an anonymous review of the newly published Tess in January 1892, inviting the first readers of Hardy's novel to seek for critical connections between its implicit assumptions and the world of late-Victorian speculative biology. The comment is at once perceptive and evasive; and its note of caution is premonitory, for eight decades of analysis have hardly enlarged our understanding of this aspect of the novel. We find, for example, Harvey Webster in his standard treatment of Hardy's intellectual development reporting that in Tess he believes 'heredity is an important and credible factor in the heroine's development'.²⁵ The point is not enlarged upon. Arnold Kettle handles with assurance his argument that the theme of Tess is fundamentally the rural decay produced by the progressive intrusion of agribusiness and that the characters, not to be seen 'merely as individuals', are largely caught up in this impersonal economic flow. Though he notes that the natural world is not a 'back-cloth' but 'the living challenging material of human existence', Kettle neglects the rich implications of this last phrase.²⁶ John Holloway takes the line that the plight of the rural worker is where the novel begins rather than ends; and part of his important essay moves away from Kettle towards a partially Darwinian reading. Hardy's artfully contrived selection of country matters does not, for him, plumb the depths of the novel; behind the absentee landlords, the slave-driving tenant farmers, the inhuman mechanisation stand certain solidities quite impervious to amelioration: 'the essential things which make life hard on [the land] are those which have made rural life hard since the beginning'. Gouging out frozen turnips, Holloway is contending, excoriates the spirit whether one is being driven by starvation or cruel master - or even being drawn along by a mechanical hoe. In the short space of his essay, though, Holloway merely offers a Darwinian lexicon - 'organism, environment, struggle, resistant adaptation, fertility, survival'²⁷ - without more than hints on how to apply it, or how those concepts are absorbed into the imagerial and metaphorical structure of the narrative.

These examples of intimation rather than exploration are quite typical of treatments of the biology, particularly the Darwinism, in Hardy's novels.²⁸ An important reason for this critical wariness is surely the felt need to defend him against the ready charge of risible intellectual pretensions: his readiness to lard his stories with rather too self-conscious science. It is easier and more comfortable to relegate Hardy's considerable knowledge of theoretical biology to Background Reading than to invite the comment that Tess, for example, is 'overloaded with ideas' which 'sometimes jut out awkwardly from the fabric of the book. . . [ideas] not so much inappropriate as imperfectly worked in'.²⁹ There is a genuine point here, for (to take an example from Hardy's similar use of classical mythology for a moment) the invocation of Aeschylus in the very last paragraph is such a signal failure precisely because it jars us into a different world. In the course of the novel we have detected no trace of the Greek pantheon at play, and the last page is an unconscionably delayed entrance. But the general issue cannot be burked by any such blanket dismissal, for the neo-Darwinism in Tess is by no means simply a question of a few citations from the Origin forced into the story. Instead, Hardy's use of the very freshest data on degeneration, sexual selection and, above all, on heredity is in the strictest sense aesthetic, for these themes actually commingle with and order the narrative flow.

Hardy, Tess and August Weismann

That Hardy should have been a Darwinian in the 1860s is not at all surprising. That he should have continued to be one right into the 1890s is something which, in the light of the preceding pages, we can see sets him apart from almost every other writer of his generation. Few of Hardy's critics have found it exceptional that a novelist should remain firmly loyal to the proroundest synthesis of his day. The exceptionality only becomes apparent when one charts the progressive decline of Darwinism as an article of serious belief among both biologists and men of letters throughout the last half of the century.

Hardy, aged only 19 when the Origin appeared, probably read it almost at once; he had certainly done so by 1864. His response was immediate and vigorous. The sudden onset in him of a largely undesired agnosticism; the revulsion from nature; the temporary spiritual paralysis: all these are very well documented, both factually in his semi-autobiographical Life and emotionally in his earliest poems. But after a while his high seriousness of temperament, once deviated into the channels of rationalism, renewed and augmented itself. 'No intellectual influence as important as that of Darwin affected the form of Hardy's thought,' Harvey Webster has said of Hardy's formative years.³⁰ This judgement is equally applicable to his mature years, too, for there is no evidence that Hardy ever seriously questioned that the definitive exposition of the vicissitudes of all life was to be found between the covers of the Origin and the Descent of Man. Hardy himself was in no doubt who his intellectual masters were. On two occasions thirteen years apart, in remonstrating with critics who had tried to identify Schopenhauer as a thinker important to him, he quoted practically the same list of names: 'Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Comte, Hume, Mill and others.³¹ Here the order of priority - four evolutionists first, two biologists and two philosophers - indicates clearly enough that Hardy was sufficiently intellectually parsimonious to spend his creative life manipulating the insights of his youth in the 1860s, just as he was sufficiently emotionally parsimonious in exhuming emotions forty years buried when he came to write the love poems of the last phase of his career. Before writing his first novel in 1871 he was conventional in sweeping away the metaphysical rubble and rounding his fiction squarely on the foundation of post-Darwinian rationalism. But, more impressively than this, he at once slashed through to the very heart of the biologists' revaluation of nature and annexed natural selection as his most potent inspiration. His profound unconventionality lay in his continuing to regard Darwinism as a discontinuous mutation in the history of thought: a theory without antecedents, in need of no softening modifications, to be accepted without reservations. That is his uniqueness. One might perhaps make out a case that by the time of The Dynasts (1904-8) even Hardy had been affected, in his conception of the Immanent Will, by the continuing thrust away from Darwinism. There is little or no biographical evidence for this, but there is the simple fact that while the novels of the 1890s are uniformly pessimistic The Dynasts does end on a note of modest hope: 'Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things fair!' (111:256). But the Immanent Will is itself a personification of natural selection. The metaphor Hardy most commonly employs is that of a brain, whose nerve fibres are the pattern of human events in space and time. Certainly the Will's potential growth to self-awareness is not presented as in any way automatic. Though Hardy's concept of a life-force is something like the other formulations of the time - Bergson's, Butler's or Shaw's - it lacks, on closer inspection, the irresistible drive upwards which is characteristic of those. But these caveats in any case throw little light on Tess: the Immanent Will is no more present there than are the Aeschylean Furies.

When, therefore, the Athenaeum critic in 1892 linked Hardy's and Huxley's views of nature he was, deliberately or not, isolating both outside the main theoretical trends of the late 1880s. It would be idle to maintain that Hardy could have remained ignorant of the anti-Darwinian party, despite the lack of hard evidence, for he knew many scientists and moved socially within the orbit of professional biologists: a note, for example, of May 1893 shows him taking an ingenuous pleasure in holding his own at a Royal Society social evening.³² The Life records almost verbatim a conversation later the same year with Sir James Crichton-Browne, noting the latter's orthodox view that 'the doctrines of Darwin require readjusting largely; for instance, the survival of the fittest in the struggle for life. There is an altruism and coalescence between cells as well as an antagonism.'³³ Hardy restricted himself to a non-committal 'Well, I can't say', but on any reading his last two novels strongly imply that the then fashionable doctrine of Altruism appealed to him no more than did Lamarckism.³⁴ Sensibly, he took from biology only that which he could assimilate, justifying this procedure in one of his rare statements about his artistic strategy: 'in life the seer should watch that pattern among general things which his idiosyncrasy moves him to observe, and describe that alone'. The presence of an infinity of figures in the carpet permitted him any interpretation of nature that chimed in with his temperament, and one such interpretation happened to be Darwinism redivivus. But Hardy's biological interests, though genuine enough, were in no sense scientific: as this note implies, it was largely accidental that his aesthetic and emotional preoccupations happened to fit in with an 'objective' structure of thought; in different circumstances, one feels, Hardy would have extracted all he needed from a purely a priori system, as Blake and Yeats did. 'The result,' he then concludes his note, 'is no mere photograph, but purely the product of the writer's own mind' (Life, 153).

Hardy's diary shows that he had fairly complete access to Weismann's new underpinning of Darwinism when he settled down in August 1889 to write the novel which became Tess; but since the Life, our only direct source of information bearing on its composition, has been shown to be seriously defective the exact details must remain elusive. The planning of the novel apparently began as early as September 1888, with Hardy's jotting on the fortunes of his own family (Life, 214-15), and sixteen chapters were complete in some form one year later. There followed in October and November three rejections by various publishers on the grounds of impropriety, which led Hardy to mutilate his novel (while, presumably, in the flow of composition) so that it was at last accepted in a cut form by the Graphic for serialisation. Nothing appeared in print before May 1891³⁵ and according to Weber's account even after the third rejection (25 October 1889) Hardy was still either writing or actively revising parts of the novel. Weber claims, for instance, that it was 'in the period of enforced delay' that Hardy developed in detail the idea of great families having humble descendants; and he puts down the fully rounded character of Tess herself to the same 'prolonged delay in bringing his novel to completion'.³⁶ Hardy was left free to work on his nascent novel throughout 1890 and doubtless he did so, for even as late as March 1891 he was still 'putting the finishing touches to Tess' (Life, 234); and we note that this does not simply mean restoring the episodes removed for serial publication, for this final task was done 'in August and the autumn' (Life, 238) before the book was published in November. Tess from notebook to novel took three and a quarter years, including the hiatus of the whole of 1890. It was in the latter half of this year that Hardy 'dipped into' Weismann's Essays upon Heredity (Life, 230) - almost certainly while undertaking, or just after he had completed, the major revisions and reconstructions which Laird's close study of the manuscript itself has shown belonged to this year.³⁷ Though Laird dates the construction of the heredity theme from virtually nothing to its final vital form to approximately December 1889-autumn 1890, it is nevertheless the case that some of the most effective passages on the heredity theme definitely did not come into the text until Hardy had finished with the manuscript altogether. The d'Urberville portraits of Tess's ancestors are to be found only in the serial Graphic version; the description of the psychological effect of these on Tess as she ascends the stairs with Angel to wash after the journey (a scene found first in the Graphic) is supplemented by two additional passages not to be found until the first edition of November 1891. It is also noteworthy that Hardy's important authorial outburst against Wordsworthian nature (to be considered later) finds its first extant treatment in the Graphic, for the relevant folio of the manuscript is missing.

To summarise these details of chronology, it is impossible to give an exact account of the responsiveness of Hardy's creative imagination in Tess to his reading of Weismann. But that biologist's work was especially well known, as we have seen, outside the ranks of his fellow-scientists; and, though the exact timing must remain vague, Hardy came across a most lucid exposition of Weismannism at a time of intense creative effort. Whether post hoc necessarily in this case implies propter hoc can never be formally proven; but an unforced careful reading of the novel itself and of a few related poems is certainly suggestive.

The Essays upon Heredity distinctly belong to the honeymoon phase of neo-Darwinism. The translators of them went to some pains in their eulogistic preface to give an assurance that Weismann's topics deserved a wide audience and that four of the Essays especially should appeal to those 'who approach the subject from its philosophical or social aspects'.³⁸ Hardy was himself this kind of reader, and it is easy to guess his motives for looking into a book which was well advertised in the general press: it was surely to seek confirmation of the idiosyncratic views on inheritance which he had already formed and was making use of in his growing novel. Perhaps, therefore (this must be surmise only), he turned at once to the second essay, 'On heredity', which began as a public lecture and so has the virtue of dispensing with the wealth of references and neologisms used elsewhere. This essay, like all the others, is concerned not with the reporting of new experimental work but with rapidly reviewing and marshalling the reasons for his proposing the two central ultra-Darwinian tenets: the allsufficiency of natural selection and consequent redundancy of 'soft' inheritance-theory; and the complete immutability of the germ plasm as it creates and passes through the bodies of generation after generation of organisms. Even in this oversimplified form these tenets may seem to be poor fodder for the creative imagination, but this was not so for Hardy. For Weismann reconfirmed the pessimistic side of Darwinism, the side turned downwards since the 1860s, and that was just the side that Hardy found the most congenial. Weismann's teaching, for example, made human progress a very dubious concept, for the neo-Darwinist could no longer rely on a sort of reversed genetic Gresham's Law making the best elements in society drive out the worse. He knew that there was no particle of inheritance for social virtue; that the 'unfit' (the old bogey was raised again) had constantly and unremittingly to be extirpated. There is direct evidence, too, of Hardy's sympathy with this way of thinking. Though its inspiration cannot be traced satisfactorily to these essays specifically, the poem 'Heredity' (written about fifteen years afterwards) asserts strikingly Hardy's imaginative retention of Weismannian ideas.³⁹ The poet lets the genetic principle speak out directly:

I live on,

Projecting trait and trace

Through time to times anon,

And leaping from place to place

Over oblivion.

'Projecting' here, with its connotations of shadows thrown out and perhaps on to a screen by an inner shaping agent, is a precise description of the continuity of the germ plasm which, being the only enduring principle, produces one structure after another (the somatoplasm) to house itself; and that it has in fact been 'continuous through numberless generations of perishing organisms, from the first origin of sexual reproduction till the present time',⁴⁰ is surely a conception dramatic enough to strike even the most imaginatively flaccid. Its apostrophe at the end of the poem as

The eternal thing in man,

That heeds no call to die

deliberately awakens religious echoes supposedly suppressed by Darwin. The plasm is all that is now left to us of human spiritual essence, of the soul. Our only immortality is to live in others.

It is curious that Hardy wrote and published in 1892 a serial, 'The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved', in which the hero doggedly chases the inherited face of his loved one through three generations from mother to grand-daughter. This clumsy and tasteless romance, one of the oddest items in the Hardy canon, shows up the inherent absurdity of trying to dramatise biology directly - something which his masterpiece of only the year before resolutely avoids doing. For it cannot be stressed too strongly that Tess is not 'about' Darwinism, old or new, any more than it is exclusively about rural industrialisation or the abuse of land tenures or the injustice of sexbiased moral codes. Weismann, who for our purposes may be taken as representative of all those workers on the problems of heredity with which Hardy was certainly familiar, perhaps added nothing more specific to the plot of Tess than offering the opportunity to focus within the limits of one science his insights into time, chance and the irreconcilability of the human and natural orders.⁴¹ Neo-Darwinism, on the other hand, does control some of the imagery and movement of a tragedy which occurs within a fictional universe operating according to wholly consistent if nonAristotelian laws.

The structure of Tess conforms in broad outline with the precepts of Aristotelian tragedy in that the narrative flows smoothly up to the peripeteta of Alec's stabbing and afterwards ebbs rapidly away with the cathartic idyll of Phase the Seventh, 'Fulfilment'. In his presentation of hamartia and nemesis, however, Hardy moves outside the classical frame and draws rather on the conventions of late-nineteenth-century naturalistic tragedy. In this, the tragic flaw came to be seen as a dynamic factor existing more strongly in the external circumstances of the tragedy - e.g. in the social environment - than in the characterisation or plot; such a view is implicit in Hardy's own definition of tragedy in 1895: 'tragedy may be created by an opposing environment either of things inherent in the universe, or of human institutions' (Life, 274), though in Tess at least he is at pains to show that these form a single implacable opponent to human endeavour. Such a conception of tragedy intersected with Hardy's renewed interest in biology over the redefinition of the old concepts of fate and hamartia in the newer terms of instinct and inheritance. Tess's tragic flaw, her mole of nature, is her alternate impulsiveness and weak dreaminess, 'the slight incautiousness of character inherited from her race';⁴² and for hubris, the avenging Erinys, Fortune's wheel, Hardy substitutes hereditarian determinism - innate 'wired-in' patterns of behaviour which serve, in the words of the Naturalistic dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck, to centre the interest 'solely and entirely in the individual, face to face with the universe';⁴³ the universe which in Tess is that of all organic life and its processes. As in classical tragedy, the meaning of the drama is progressively revealed to both audience and protagonist in the anagnorisis, the transition from ignorance to knowledge. The state of ignorance in which Tess begins is shared at various times by both Angel and Alec, for all of them foolishly believe that they are sufficiently masters of their fate to neglect the forces of heredity. Tess, for example, as she rallies after the death of Sorrow, is mistaken enough to suppose that of her ancestors 'not a thing of all that had been theirs did she retain but the old seal and spoon' (p. 132); she fails to perceive the non-material legacy bequeathed to her by the mindless forces of heredity which now control her motivation and impulses. Similarly Alec's conversion is not very convincing for the simple yet compelling reason, Hardy tells us, that his facial expression has been forced out of its natural and predetermined mould. The educative process which Tess undergoes comes to a climax in the wedding-night scene at Wellbridge where she learns, as much from the portraits of her vicious ancestors as from Angel's renunciation of her, that there is only a 'flux and reflux ... in everything under the sky' (p. 448) and that no guidance is due to her from either history or nature. So Tess suffers not through any moral deficiency but because she is human in a world not devised for humans, and she is educated not when her moral lapse is clear to her but when she recognises that she lives in a Darwinian world which has neither human significance nor value. The reader is guided to this insight by the omniscient author well before it is forced on Tess herself. Our introduction to the squalid Durbeyfield family is followed by the oblique authorial comment:

all these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship ... If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these halfdozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with them - six helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard conditions. . . Some people would like to know whence the poet ... gets his authority for speaking of 'Nature's holy plan'. (p. 24)

This passage, of extraordinary intensity for Hardy, who nearly always preserves a tone of cool irony in his interpolations, forms an extended metaphor working on at least three levels. The microcosmic world of the Durbeyfield family with its bungling fecundity mirrors the universe of the novel as a whole. On the surface the image of the ship's passengers suggests the nexus of social and domestic mores in which the children and Tess, too, for she is a part of all this, are snared. The implicit freedom of 'passengers' does not eliminate the possibility of social betterment; but as Hardy's indignation gathers force the passengers become 'captives under hatches' - just as the children are the slaves of circumstances so is Tess herself shackled by her ancestry. At both these levels were are still in the human world. But at the bottom of the metaphor the Durbeyfield ship is an Ark, and not a secure Noah's Ark under divine protection but a frail bark only just proof against the ravening natural order; the children therein are young animals naked before nature's blank and unyielding visage, condemned to suffer by having the unwanted gift of awareness forced upon them so that birth itself is 'an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion' (p. 456). The attack on Wordsworth sets into motion a current of speculation which runs right through the novel and which continues the reversal of Wordsworthian pantheism which Hardy began sometime in the previous decade with the poem 'Nature's Questioning'. Instead of the poet himself going to receive impulses from the vernal wood, he represents bewildered creatures coming to him for enlightenment. Hardy offers in that poem a range of answers, but in Tess the impression generally is that there is no 'holy plan'; or if there is a plan it must be wholly alien and, far from being holy, must be positively diabolic. One charge against Hardy is that his nature rejects its theoretical neutrality and strews rather more pains about his characters' pilgrimages than blisses; and this is indeed true in Tess. In fact, there is no consistent attitude towards nature. The scenes at Talbothays, with their images of agricultural prosperity and burgeoning vitality, are strongly set off against the denunciation of Wordsworthian pantheism, and this has caused some readers to dismiss all such sequences as no more than extended pathetic fallacies serving as 'notations of the immediate context, pointing up and identifying, in a quite limited way, the effects being sought'.⁴⁴ But this is to short-circuit a central issue of the biological debate, and the power of the novel is diminished by insisting on an excludedmiddle logic. The novel is ambivalent towards nature as malignant or benignant precisely because the new biology was itself ambivalent. What we do have is a ransacking of all the resources of Nature and Nurture for the bases of morality; and rock-bottom is reached with Tess's poignant insight 'once victim, always victim - that's the law!' (p. 423). Her fate confirms its truth. It is a truth iterated in Hardy's exploration of the human meaning of sexual selection (a subsidiary theme, as it is in Darwin a subsidiary hypothesis), starting with the May dance which is itself a stub of a fertility ritual. Here Tess's 'pedigree, ancestral skeletons, monumental record' (p. 16) fail to secure her a partner in the sexual battle, for acting without preference Angel takes the first to hand. In the consummatory scene where Angel carries the four milkmaids over the flooded road the girls, with insects caught in their gauzey dresses, are themselves 'entrapped flies and butterflies' (p. 183). Though they bovinely accept the natural dispensation ('such supplanting was to be'), their rational awareness does not release them from individual torture. Every detail is right in the following scene in the communal bedchamber. Each girl seeks escape in sleep; the semi-tropical weather adds to the languor; the dripping cheesewring marks time passing, the emotional pressure and the mechanistic relentlessness. Sexual selection hurts:

the air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate with the hopeless passion of the girls. They writhed feverishly under the oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature's law - an emotion which they had neither expected nor desired... each was but a portion of one organism called sex. (p. 187)

The dramatic bite of the suffering here derives from the twin irresponsibilities of society and nature. Tess's own sexual guilt is, to be sure, presented as the artefact of an arbitrary moral code; but is that code any more arbitrary than nature itself?. What closer interaction of the social machinery could remedy the plight of the lovesick milkmaids? Only some such abolishment of the sexual pressure altogether as Hudson's dream solution in A Crystal Age. The social order in Tess is oppressive only because human institutions mirror the universal callousness, just as man's interference can only temporarily palliate the flow of suffering towards the maximum possible for his species. As for nature, not only its moral but also its aesthetic values are suspect, for the latter only bear an accidental reference to the human condition, and frequently mock it. The horse's blood on the road shows an 'iridescence of coagulation' (p. 36) despite the horrific accident which has released it; the refracted light in the water-bottle continues to work on the 'chromatic problem' of forming a spectrum despite Tess's catastrophic disclosure to Angel (p. 291). In short, nature and society unify in a single conspiracy against the individual - an idea which is conveyed with the utmost economy and precision in the lounging figure of the postilion, unemployed and burdened with the weeping chancre on his leg - a stigma which has its origin in his social role (the bruise is caused by his manner of sitting) but its persistent refusal to heal in the imponderables of physiology.

This almost surrealistic figure also condenses into a single image the strong theme of the degenerative collapse both of the rural life generally and of personal ancestry. The disrepair and dilapidation of farm buildings; the impoverishment leading to urban drift and a painful uprooting from a native locale; the seasonal shifts from high summer to dreary late autumn and ravaging winter - all these modulate insensibly into a meditation on the decay of families and indeed of the human rural germ plasm itself. This latter idea probably owes little to Weismann (although the 'On heredity' essay does contain a clear explication of his idea of panmixia) and more to Hardy's genealogical researches into the Durberville family. Still, rural decay is a direct function of its inability to cope with change, for adaptation to a particular way of life has caused fatal rigidities in structure and habit. The city and the country are offered metaphorically as two mutually incompatible organisms competing for the same territory and nutrition. Along the railway line urbanity reaches out its 'steam feeler', a pseudopodium which touches rurality and recoils 'as if what it touched had been uncongenial' (p. 239). The greater vitality of the city is swamping the country; the fitter are prevailing (and the little detail about the watered milk marks Hardy's equivocation); the weaker are failing to adapt and exploit a new niche. Chaseborough has become a 'decayed market-town' (p. 75), Kingsbere a 'half-dead townlet' (p. 461) and the d'Urbervilles a 'worn-out family' (p. 213) for exactly the same reason that the emigrant farmworkers in Brazil die out in the hostile environment: the 'workfolk' are a 'species' trapped by their excessive specialisation - the loads on the wagons, instinctively built the same in every village, are 'as peculiar, probably, to the rural labourer as the hexagon to the bee' (p. 459) -. just as the Insectivora have trapped themselves for stability's sake in an evolutionary cul-de-sac. The stirring up of these communities by the new economic conditions has disturbed 'the backbone' of the villages and has induced the mindless migrations from place to place: the frantic mobility is that of the disordered anthill. We are encouraged to read even the history of individual families under the aspect of natural history; for when the rivet-holes in the despoiled tombs of the d'Urbervilles are compared to 'martin-holes in a sand-cliff' (p. 464) it is as if families, like species and individuals, can only enjoy a certain lifespan before the edge of their reproductive capacities is turned. And so we find a succession of images related to medallions and coining, clearly to suggest the stamping of innumerable generations with a consequent blunting of the die. The antiquarian-parson Tringham on seeing the Durbeyfield profile exclaims 'that's the d'Urberville nose and chin a little debased' (p. 4), and Alec, too, has 'full lips, badly moulded' (p. 44). By contrast The Slopes, home of the Stoke-d'Urberville parvenus, looks like 'the last coin issued from the Mint' (p. 43). And Tess herself, in whose person her vigorous ancestry finds its recrudescence, shows while milking a profile 'keen as a cameo cut from the dun background of the cow' (p. 192).

Hardy's use of Weismann's belief that the germ plasm, the material principle of heredity, is the sole biological reality leads him to impose on the reader the temporal insignificance of the individual carrier of it. In the opening conversation, in fact, the jocular contempt of Tringham towards John Durbeyfield is clear from the way he uses 'you' as though the mere idea of an extinct family has more reality than its degraded offshoots. But, then, that is indeed one of the prime assertions of the novel, as it is in the poem 'Heredity'. There we noticed the image of projection: the casting of inherited characteristics on to a screen of ever-renewed flesh. The same image is picked up in the quiet, superbly handled scene of evening milkingtime at Talbothays. As the shadows of the cows are cast on the wail the declining sun copies them 'as diligently as it had copied Olympian shapes on marble facades long ago'. Here the biological order has a certain stability, and these individual cows seem in shadow to be as permanent as their species itself. But the illusion of one matches the illusion of the other, the shadows part and parcel with those in Plato's Cave allegory. The sole reality is mutability, the flow of the germ plasm itself; individuals are nothing; generations of cows 'have passed to an oblivion almost inconceivable in its profundity' (pp. 136-7). Hardy, like Darwin in the Origin, leaves us to make the final connections. Time opens up and, as though in parallel mirrors, we see receding replications of the organic world - including humanity. Hardy goes even farther than this. Though paradoxically the portrait of Tess - and, to a lesser degree, of Angel and Alec, too - is so intense because he makes her exist not merely as a fully rounded character but even, given our knowledge of her heredity, as a four-dimensional one, another part of Tess's education (and ours) consists in Hardy's showing her and us that her heredity is the thing 'inherent in the universe' which, valueless though irresistible, helps to destroy her; and this despite her dreams of 'an aged and dignified face. . .furrowed with incarnate memories' (p. 45). Hardy may well insist in a later intrusion that 'to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children. . .does not mend the matter' (p. 91), but the question remains: then what does? For the tragedy can be traced back to Tess's inheritance of the qualities of her ancestors; to the fact that on her father's side she is an atavism, a 'belated seedling of an effete aristocracy' (p. 297) as Angel angrily but accurately calls her, and that on her mother's side her florescent charms ('unknightly, unhistorical') are the source of her destructive sexual magnetism through which the purely animal powers of nature flow untrammelled. In his attack on Tess after the wedding-night revelations at Wellbridge, Angel alienates the reader with his gross, unjust and hypocritical anger; yet we are forced to perceive that he does penetrate to the centre of Tess's condition and that his recrimination is meaningful: 'I cannot help associating your decline as a family with this other fact - of your want of firmness. Decrepit families imply decrepit wills, decrepit conduct' (p. 297). The words are outrageous enough but, striking out the moral obloquy, we are surely meant to think that they are scarcely more outrageous than the truth. Though Tess at crucial points in her history believes she chooses her destiny, the movement of the novel is such that it hammers away ruthlessly at the tragic self-deception here; for at exactly those points where she feels most free (free to write a letter, free to repulse Alec's advances) something happens to negate that feeling: never a deus ex machina, however, for between them heredity and physiology provide the most reductive, the most behaviouristic, of explanations. Weismannian inheritance was deterministic. That Hardy fully accepted it as such emerges from his handling of the numerous pathetic fallacies Tess contains. Sometimes these collapse under the weight of the significance that Hardy tries to charge them with; but more often it is very clear that neo-Darwinism allowed Hardy to empathise with natural processes in a way not at all fallacious: that is, as a 'negative Romantic'. At Talbothays, for example, Tess in a state of anguish hears a 'crack-voiced' sparrow sing 'in a sad, machine-made tone' (p. 173). Reading that last odd adjective with post-Darwinian eyes we see that more is going on here than a simple transfer of emotion: it can be read as being, on the most commonplace level of fact, literally true. A nightingale singing with unpremeditated art is Romantic poetic licence: Tess's sparrow sings because its hormones make it sing, because a billion years of selective evolution deny even the possibility of its doing anything else. Given the persistent identification of Tess's fate with that of birds, we can hardly expect her to be allotted any more freedom.⁴⁵ But there is one important distinction - though it is not an advantage - to be found in her greater human consciousness, her more exposed nerve endings. At the crisis of the novel, when Tess is actually reduced to the status of a hunted animal, her situation both compares and contrasts with that of the wounded pheasants (ch. XLI). Hardy makes his identification by deliberately breaking down the barriers between artificial and natural breeding, showing the absurdity (in an existentialist sense) of the second in terms of the first. The pheasants are brought into being solely for the shotgun. Such breeding is in every sense unnatural, and it remains so after we recognise the paradox: nature itself can be unnatural. The sufferings of Tess, like the pheasants', are terminated in nature only by the inability to bear more. But the contrast is insistent. Their miseries are quickly relieved by a broken neck; Tess's greater potentiality for pain drives her on, but only to the same fate. The pointlessness is appalling.

A reading of Tess from the point of view of inheritance theory, then, must assert the novel's rigid determinism, its total pessimism, and its fidelity to one coherent scientific vision of the world. The large number of coincidences in the plot have traditionally been thought to spoil its determinism. But are those coincidences really offered to us as collocated but random events? Do not most of them stem from a sense of character as fate? When Tess goes to the Clare house and finds them at church, that is coincidence. But her subsequent retreat is fully explicable in terms of her slightly vacillating temper, and is proffered as such. Michael Millgate agrees that accidents in Tess 'are rarely if ever a product of the random inexplicable intrusion of fate but rather of the inevitable - or at least, credible - outcome of the immediate narrative context of their own personalities as conditioned and limited by the forces of heredity and environment'.⁴⁶ Exactly: Hardy distinguishes between random and merely chance events just as the Victorian biologists found it necessary to do. A large number of chance events may simulate purposiveness, and therefore suggest either helpful design or malevolence - for these are opposite sides of the same illusion - in the natural world. But Hardy the novelist agrees with the naturalist that to invoke chance is only to admit ignorance of the exact links in the causal chain. Neither doubts that the chain exists and is unbreakable. In general, then, the coldest possible eye is cast throughout on the human condition, though one must always remember that Hardy's adoption of neo-Darwinian inheritance theory and with it a set of dismal inferences was always a purely voluntary action, for his reading was a selection from the facts, even from the scientific facts, just as was Butler's advocacy of neo-Lamarckism. There is no doubt, however, that Hardy himself regarded his novel as an epiphany, a 'moment of vision', to use the phrase which he applied to a group of poems in which he speaks out with his own voice. One of these poems, 'The Pedigree' (dated 1916 by Hardy), strongly supports this contention. As the poet studies his family tree late at night circumambient nature echoes the degradation he feels: the clouds are 'green-rheumed' and the moon is 'in its old age'. He perceives that the biological leverage his ancestors exert is irresistible, that 'every heave and coil and move I made/Within my brain' was 'As long forestailed by their so making it'. And so on to the blank conclusion

'I am merest mimicker and counterfeit! -

Though thinking, I am I,

And what I do I do myself alone'

which coincides exactly with Tess's refusal to learn history: 'what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only ... The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands" (p. 162). But Tess is forced against her will to remember it. In this her tragedy is absolute and is not relieved by her undoubted nobility of character; for her struggles, her fine-spirited refusal to submit to the inevitable, merely serve to lime her the more thoroughly. And what is true of Tess, this poem suggests, is equally true of Hardy himself. The malignity of nature, which so often seems to be our active opponent, is actually a subjective impression filtered through a consciousness too refined for a Darwinian world of defect where botching and making do are the very means of advancement. What hope there is in the novel - little indeed - springs not from Tess's individual heroism but from that single vital source, the force of inheritance itself. In the very last statement of the book, as 'Liza-Lu and Angel join hands and go on in a kind of genetic parable, Tess's last hope that 'if she were to become yours it would almost seem as if death had not divided us' (p. 505) is fulfilled and the genotype is made secure. The sheer heartlessness of the conception is fitting.