The unconscious writers, on the other hand, like Dickens and Scott, seem
suddenly and without their own consent to be lifted up and swept
onwards. The wave sinks and they cannot say what has happened or why.
Among them — it is the source of his strength and of his weakness — we
must place Hardy. His own word, “moments of vision”, exactly describes
those passages of astonishing beauty and force which are to be found in
every book that he wrote. With a sudden quickening of power which we
cannot foretell, nor he, it seems, control, a single scene breaks off
from the rest. We see, as if it existed alone and for all time, the
wagon with Fanny’s dead body inside travelling along the road under the
dripping trees; we see the bloated sheep struggling among the clover; we
see Troy flashing his sword round Bathsheba where she stands
motionless, cutting the lock off her head and spitting the caterpillar
on her breast. Vivid to the eye, but not to the eye alone, for every
sense participates, such scenes dawn upon us and their splendour
remains. But the power goes as it comes. The moment of vision is
succeeded by long stretches of plain daylight, nor can we believe that
any craft or skill could have caught the wild power and turned it to a
better use. The novels therefore are full of inequalities; they are
lumpish and dull and inexpressive; but they are never arid; there is
always about them a little blur of unconsciousness, that halo of
freshness and margin of the unexpressed which often produce the most
profound sense of satisfaction. It is as if Hardy himself were not quite
aware of what he did, as if his consciousness held more than he could
produce, and he left it for his readers to make out his full meaning and
to supplement it from their own experience.
Virginia Woolf,
