[Abstract] The description of Nature in Hardy`s Wessex novels is characteristic of Hardy`s style. The description of Nature not only serves as a setting, but also becomes a vital part of Hardy`s novels. He focuses on the interrelations between human, Nature and society. Nature in his novels is personated and melted with the characters together. Hardy believed firmly that man was part of Nature, a guardian of Nature and should always remain true to their closeness with Nature. In all Hardy`s Wessex novels, the characters, who can live in harmony with Nature all deserve a good ending, while those who cannot are by all means go ruining. The conflict between man’s aspirations and his environment is the central unifying force of Hardy`s tragic novels. It stresses that human should live in harmony with Nature.

[Key Words] Hardy; Nature; Wessex people; fate; harmony

【摘 要】哈代的威塞克斯小说中的自然景物描写风格独特。自然景物的描写在他的这些小说中已不仅仅起着舞台背景式的作用，而是成为小说中的一个有机组成部分。他的小说侧重于探讨人、自然、环境及其相互间的关系。在他笔下，自然被人格化了，并和人熔为一体。在其威塞克斯系列小说中，凡能与自然和谐相处的人物都能获得一个美好的结局;反之，都无一例外地走向毁灭。主人公心中的抱负和其所处环境的矛盾是促成哈代悲剧小说的根源所在。哈代坚信人类是自然的一部分，是自然的守护者，且应总是和自然同存共进。他强调人应该与大自然和谐共存。

【关键词】哈代; 自然; 威塞克斯人; 命运; 和谐

1. Introduction

The world of Nature, for Hardy, is just that: a society, in which exploitation, solidarity, and the struggle for survival are experienced quite as keenly as they are in urban settings. The interpretation of the novels will focus on their obeisance to pastoral convention.

Hardy`s “Wessex,” as he himself explains, was taken from an old English history; he gave it to a district that was once part of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom. It is generally confined to the area of Dorsetshire. It was more than just a location for him; he prized the manners and customs that formed a part of its social order. He mourned the passing of these native customs and the changing character of the villages during England’s rapid industrialization. He found a way to preserve the old order by capturing it in his novels. His novels achieve a high degree of universal significance through his keen discernment of the intimate relations between character and Nature. In most of his Wessex novels, Nature is personated and melted with characters, and is pictured as a hard, unrelenting force. On the one hand, the characters who can live in harmony with Nature all deserve a good ending; while those who can not are by all means go ruining. What’s more, the development of the plots in these novels are set in the environment without exception and shown by their attitude towards Nature. On the other hand, they were all disturbed and confused by their surroundings, natural and social environments. Hardy regards Nature as something that provides people with a permanent source of strength and stresses that human should live in harmony with Nature.

This is the central theme in The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d`Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. These four tragic novels, compared with Hardy`s earlier novels, which on the whole, are of a happier tone in Nature description, are typical so far as the description of Nature is concerned. The four novels make full use of the Nature description as the setting of the characters` life and activities. In them, Hardy tactfully presents how Nature influences the forming of the characters` tragedy. So, the following is an exploration of Hardy`s four tragic novels, showing how Hardy`s description of Nature influences the characters` fate.

To begin with, it is necessary to learn about this great novelist—Hardy`s life and his intimate relationships with Nature.

2. Influence of Nature on Hardy and his novels

2.1 Hardy`s Life

Thomas Hardy (1840—1928) was born into Victorian England, in a small thatched cottage in the hamlet of Higher Bockhampton three miles from Dorchester. It was a picturesque place. There were several quaint-looking houses with trees, clipped hedges, orchards and white gate-post-balls, in the avenue of cherry trees which led to the cottage, and behind it stretched the vast expanse of Egdon or Puddletown Heath. So Hardy is always considered a Victorian novelist. With the selection of Wessex as the setting for his novels, Hardy assured his success as a novelist. The area was familiar to him from his childhood. His walk to school took him along country lanes, and so he became familiar with rustic scenes. The “Wessex” includes those southern countries from Surrey in the east, to the Bristol Channel and the Dovenshire—Cornwall border on the west. It is rich in legend in the history of England.

Even as a boy and a young man Hardy was being modified by his reading of English literature, the classics, and history, by his careful study of architecture, by his interest in pictures and in acting, by his disturbing contacts with Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and by his puzzled study of the Oxford Movement theologians and their opponents. As a man he became more and more uneasy with innovations that were displacing rustic customs and with social ideas at variance with the older codes of life. He found evils aggravated by the intolerant judgment of society, as if there were not enough that are beyond human control and inherent in human life.

The most powerful of all the influences on Hardy, however, was the spirit of the age in which he lived. It was an age of transition, disturbing in itself for a sensitive mind. The old agricultural England was in the process of being devoured by the industrial development. Old ties were breaking and population was shifting from country to town. Hardy was not in any sense opposed to the world that was passing. The rural England to which he was attached by every tie of early, adolescent sentiment was crumbling before his eyes. It was really regrettable that what had seemed so secure was disappearing so irrevocably. Life seemed to Hardy to be precarious. By his novels, Hardy comes over as one who wanted to protect and preserve it. Moreover, he is in search of, “how people can develop a deeply intuitive relationship with their surroundings that can give meaning and purpose to their lives.”[1]

2.2 Hardy and Nature

To figure out what Nature means to Hardy; what Hardy says of Clym Yeobright, walking on Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native, might have been said of himself:

“If anyone knew the heath well, it was Clym. He was permeated with its scenes, with its substance, with its odors. He might be said to be its product. His eyes had first opened thereon; with its appearance all the first images of his memory were mingled; his estimate of life had been colored by it. His toys had been the flint knives and arrowheads which he found there, wondering why stones should “grow” to such odd shapes; his flowers the purple bells and yellow gorse; his animal kingdom the snakes and croppers; his society its human haunters.” [2]

Here we can find Hardy`s fervid love and respect towards Nature. In his Wessex novels, Hardy believes that “man is not belong to himself”, but part of Nature. This is embodied as the above.

Hardy`s perception of the world of Nature is very accurate; small details, like the buttercups which stain Bellwood’s boots as he walks through a field on a spring day, show us how wide-awake Hardy`s senses were to external impressions of Nature.

In addition, he is deeply interested in man’s relationship with his natural environment----in his case Wessex (actually Dorset). He believed strongly that man was a guardian of Nature and had a responsibility to look after the animal kingdom (like Gabriel Oak) and to pass it on undamaged to future generations. He always stresses that human should live in harmony with Nature. Like Wordsworth, he writes about men and women living in constant communion with Nature, shepherds, for example, tramps, or rural workers, and he feels that Nature provides these people with a permanent source of strength.

2.3 Hardy`s style

Hardy`s novels, all written before 1900, are Victorian novels. But they make at least three outstanding differences:

Firstly, Nature by Hardy, is not only used as a setting, but plays a vital part in the characters` life and the developing of the plots. Nature is a relenting determining order.

Secondly, Hardy`s novels are poetic. He fully utilizes his poetic talents in the descriptions of Nature. They incorporate the description of Nature into their thematic structures. “His language becomes poetic as he describes the beautiful dawn and spring days.”[3]

Thirdly, Hardy`s stories, by the setting of Nature he provided, are always moving and bewitching. “They touch hearts not so much by means of their plots (which are very good) as through the pathos of the emotional tangle.”[4] His structure is essentially an organism in which action is unified by his preoccupation with the conflict between man and Nature. All his heroes always have to fight a losing battle against an environment that is bent on ruining his aspirations in life. This conflict between man’s aspirations and his environment is the central unifying force of Hardy`s novels.

In a word, the description of Nature is characteristic of the style of Hardy`s Wessex novels.

3. Nature, character and fate

The following is an illustration of Hardy`s four tragic novels, one by one. The stories are all set in the fictional southern England region that Hardy named Wessex, and have become known as the “Wessex novels.” All these books have a lot of natural descriptions, which in turn exert a great influence on the characters and serve as a foil of the development of the plots.

3.1 The Return of the Native (1878)

The book’s title—The Return of the Native, gives readers the first indication of a close, and potentially disastrous, affinity of situation, event, and character. In this novel, the key word “Native” not only characterizes Clym but also provides the first description of Eustacia, which is ironic yet succinctly. Moreover, “Native” also signals the great significance of the environment where the events take place: the topography of Egdon Heath presents an all-encompassing situation. It appears boundless spatially and unchangeable temporally. It is peculiarly stable and self-sufficiently isolated. And it exerts a powerful influence on the characters throughout. The setting here is not just a space marker. It topographically delineates and furthers the novel’s characteristic unity of place. The novel’s first chapter elevates the heath from setting to situation in a tragic sense and maps the field of human activity.

“The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.”[5] The people who live on barren Egdon Heath have a great feeling for the great underlying reality of Nature, which is always there although human lives, and human civilizations, come and go. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Nature was a positive and on the whole a friendly force; while in this novel, on the contrary, it is something that you have to put up with.

The people in this novel can roughly be divided into two groups, two fates, according to the characters`different attitudes towards Nature and their different responses to it.

The first group—characters who have hatred towards Nature, the heath. People who refuse to adapt to the heath will be broken. Hardy shows us two characters, Eustacia, the heroine, who yearns for a life of luxury in Paris, and the gambler and compulsive flirt Wildeve, both of whom are forced to live on the heath, but hate it. “Do you mean Nature? I hate her already”; “I cannot endure the heath, except in its purple season. The heath is a cruel taskmaster to me.”[6] In the end they both die, drowned in the flooded weir on a night of wind and storm.

The other group—people who own a fervid love to Nature, the heath. The hero, Clym`s attitude towards Nature is, “To my mind it is most exhilarating, and strengthening, and soothing. I would rather live on these hills than anywhere else in the world.”[7] People like Clym who accept the heath and understand its moods can live on it without too much trouble. This is also true of the sweet and unsophisticated Thomasin, who brings her baby out on to the heath quite happily, and the reddleman Diggory Venn. This weird character, although he appears to have come from a realm outside Nature, is actually very much like Oak in Hardy`s another novel. He is essentially kind and unselfish. And like Thomasin, thoroughly well adapted to life on the heath. At certain times, particularly in the remarkable scene where he plays dice with Wildeve by the light of glow-worms, we feel that he has powers, which aren’t quite human. Nature seems to work on his side, because he understands and knows how to relate to it. At last, he has his reward, when most of the other characters are broken or die.

The motivating force of the tragic action is, the conflict between Clym`s aspiration to reform society through education, and “Eustacia`s to enlarge her spiritual world by means of escape from the cramping Egdon Heath.”[8]

The gloomy Egdon Heath is used as the setting of this novel. The air of it suggests the “tragic possibilities.” No action directly presented in the novel takes place outside the boundary of this heath. It is also the witness of history, for “when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis----the final Overthrow.”[9] Upon this Nature scene appears the humanity, along with trouble: Thomasin returns with the bitterness of an abortive marriage; Wildeve and Eustacia are involved in a relation of doubtful Nature; Eustacia longs to fly away from the wilderness of the heath to give free play to her soul in the vanities and grandeurs of Paris life. Everything seems to have been brought to the edge of tragedy.

Hardy`s tragedy is more than personal and social. The natural world, namely, the Egdon Heath, plays a not insignificant part. Suggesting its immense, and potentially destructive, power, the heath’s titanic form contrasts markedly with the frailty and Vulnerability of human “form”, so Hardy`s heath is endowed with distinctly anthropomorphic qualities. It is so personated. With its crooked, crisscrossing paths and lonely dwellings separated by acres of furzy wilderness, the heath provides an almost perfect setting for chance meetings and tragic misunderstandings. For example, Mrs. Yeobright, the hero`s mother journeys across its burning face in August, only to be turned away by the closed door of her son’s cottage and to be stung to death by an adder. Eustacia wanders in distraction under its heavy storms, only to be drowned in the weir. By now, the heath is not only the gloomy setting for the tragic drama, but also an agent participating actively in the destruction of the main characters. Nature takes part in the characters` activities, according to their attitudes towards Nature itself and plays an important role in the development of the plots, as described above.

3.2 The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

The Mayor of Casterbridge, is a novel much more eventful with a relatively more complicated plot. It is successful from the action of the plot. Hardy founded his plot upon the university—observed conflict between different interpretations of Nature’s impact upon the characters. Such evocation must be simple at its heart, and so it is here.

The portrayal of the rural, in conjunction with the town forms the perfect image of a complete society:

“Casterbridge, as has been hinted, was a place deposited in the block upon a cornfield. There was no suburb in the modern sense, or transitional intermixture of town and down. It stood, with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-cut and distinct, like a chessboard on a green tablecloth.”[10]

The uncompromising conflict between the hero, Henchard and Nature lies at the heart of Henchard`s tragedy. This is also the main driving force of the story. The Nature’s effect in this novel can be divided into two main parts. On the one hand, in the early sections of this novel, the hero achieves his success in his harmony with Nature. On the other hand, a sharp change arises. This conflict happens because the hero’s humanity turns bad and becomes out of harmony with Nature.

Nature, here refers to weather, plays a vital part in the development of the plots. “Work is taken in a serious and specific sense; in the symbolic set piece of the storm scene of Far from the Madding Crowd, for example, the reader is still always made aware of how Gabriel’s experience of work enables him to predict the weather or how he goes about saving the ricks.”[11] However, in this novel there is a sharp difference. The readers are apt to “grasp the ‘feel’ of the gloomy weather.”[11] The descriptions are almost to a symbolic level. The descriptions are integral in creating the atmosphere of the events, what’s more, they help the development of the plots to reach a tragic goal. All of these occur in the shadow of Nature.

The hero, Henchard`s tragedy becomes irrevocable only when a great deal of bad luck follows him constantly. Henchard`s worst economic blow comes when he buys enormous quantities of grain in expectations of a bad harvest. But the weather stays good so he has to sell at a low price. Then the weather turns after all, and Henchard is further ruined. Again, he happens to open Susan’s letter, which proves to be a source of profound bitterness, at a juncture when he believes that he has just found a reservoir of happiness. In one word, the root of the hero’s tragedy lies in “the conflict between character and environment, which focus on those social conditions that impact the characters.”[12]

3.3 Tess of the d`Urbervilles (1891)

It is known that Hardy wrote about “West-country life in its less explored recesses”; and he often made his hero a young man who has been cast adrift, in a moral and intellectual wilderness, and there were no fixed rules to guide her, only the drive of her own soul. That is, Tess`s firmly and constantly pursuit towards her so-called happiness.

In Tess of the d`Urbervilles, Hardy focuses on pastoral in order to contrast different ways of life, and different attitudes to Nature, in one narrative situation. The beginning of the story is the wonderfully described Blackmoor, in a descriptive, remarkably visual way:

“Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an enclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colorless. Here in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedge-rows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmooor.”[13]

So far, this is the great beautiful Nature presented by Hardy to the readers. But it means more. Nature in this novel “appears as a powerful presence, manifested by the strong physicality of fertile meadow and summer fogs, as well as by the minutely detailed seasonal round of labors like milking.”[14] His people have few choices in their helpless struggles with a tragic necessity.

In this novel, the heroine’s life changes, as the seasons shift. And these two are interwoven intimately and foiled by the artful descriptions of Nature. It can be analyzed from the following two parts.

The first part: a happy life and a vigorous Nature.

The character and the Nature’s feeling are melted together intensely, and hence form a harmony picture “Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not grow passionate. The ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by their surroundings. And as the outward heats oppressed Clare, so was he burdened inwardly by waxing fervor of passion for the soft and silent Tess.”[15]

The Nature by Hardy is always melted with the heroine. By so, it implies that how the heroine’s beauty is in harmony with the beauties of the Nature and she is of the daughter of Nature:

“Minute diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess`s eyelashes, and drops upon her hair, like seed pearls. When the day grew quite strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover, Tess then lost her strange and ethereal beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes scintillated in the sunbeams, and she was again the dazzlingly fair dairymaid only, who had to hold her oown against the other women of the world.”[16]

To present a cheerful atmosphere for the harvest, Hardy personates the sun, and so achieves a vivid description of the sun. And “a sense of pastoral is evoked by the hinted affinity of the scenery and traditional, manual work.”[17]

“It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapors, attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces within hollows and converts, where they waited till they should be dried away to nothing.

The sun on account of the mist had a curious sentient, personal look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene, explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment. One could feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, Godlike creature, gazing down in the vigor and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with interest for him.”[18]

The second part: a miserable life and a sharp contrast description of Nature as a setting.

As for Tess’s hard and miserable life in the wild, barren farm, Hardy presented it by the foiling of a harsh Nature description.

“There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy and measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player. One morning after the few lonely trees and the thorns of the hedge-rows appeared as if they had put off a vegetable for an animal integument ……gates. After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost, when strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silenrtly on the ……visitants relished as food.”[19]

Here, the sharp comparison between Tess’s hard life and her harmony she is with Nature, serves as a foil and gives readers a great shock and regret! Since Tess is happily adjusted to her environment. “A fresh and Virginal daughter of Nature”[20] is what she first seems to Angel Clare. She is so sensitive to Nature. However, the modern society is diseased, often cruel and inhuman, and the conventions it lays down are in many important ways unnatural. Tess has been made to break an accepted social law, but not any law that exists in Nature. And it is the conflict between natural human feelings and social conventions that destroys her. It’s a conflict that acted out in the mind of the man she loves, Angel Clare.

Angel is one of the most interesting heroes whom Hardy had so far attempted to draw. Like Clym, he finds that living close to nature makes him surprisingly cheerfully and begins to like the outdoor life for its own sake.

He grows away from old associations, and sees something new in life and humanity. What’s more, he makes close acquaintance with phenomena which he has before known but darkly----the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things. Together with this new awareness of nature goes a new awareness of human beings; he begins to pay his respect to the dairy workers. ------ “A real delight in their companionship.”[21]

From the fate of Tess, we can see what happens to a girl when her values collide with the Victorian moral code. Compared with The Mayor of Casterbridge, the structure of Tess of the d`Urbervilles is superbly simple. The story is about the tragic history of one single character. If Henchard`s is a masculine rebellion against his environment, Tess`s tragedy should be characterized as innocence and purity being destroyed by ignoble circumstances. There is no one in the novel that can rival Tess as the principal character. The main interest is the suffering and struggling of weakness and innocence in the clutch of circumstances.

In Hardy`s novel, the change of four seasons are always interwoven with the development of the plot. This skill is also applied well in this story. At the turning point of spring to summer, all the lives in the Nature are spirited. It is a hopeful season. With great hope and love towards life, Tess goes out to make a living. “She goes to the d`Urbervilles` and is raped or seduced by the guileful Alec. In the end of the suffering October, Tess goes home with great bitterness.”[22] In the following year’s August, it is a harvest time, while Tess gives birth to her illegitimate child. Three years later, it is at the turning point of spring to summer once again, Tess refreshes herself and gives herself a new life. She goes the second time to find work, to pursue her so-called happiness. Here Tess finds hope in the seasonal renewal of life and is thus inspired to go out in search of a better life. After all, she is the daughter of the Nature; she has the strength and hope for a new life just as the other forms of lives in Nature, as the seasons change! During the vigorously summer and fruitful autumn, Tess and Clare fall in love with each other in the Dairy. There they pass the happiest time in their life. The day they marry is the Eve, the end of an old year and a start of a new one. It symbolizes the disjunctive of Tess`s fate. When discarded by Clare, she went lonely to the wild, barren Flintcomb-Ash Farm; there she lives through the chilly winter and so spent the most painful period in her life. And when she and Clare have the final reunion and understanding between herself and Clare, and so enjoy a brief, yet pleasure time. Then, it is a typical weather of May—very warm and restful.

From the descriptions above, we can see that, Hardy interweaves the development of the plots with the renewal of the seasons. He used the symbolized meanings of Nature quite skillful, quite well. What’s more, he tactfully presents the changes of the character’s mood and Nature. To Hardy, “The unfolding of Tess`s fate is like a stream flowing through the changing country, with the natural vicissitudes of landscape.”[23] This is also another successful example of Hardy`s complex treatment of plot and character by his successful description of Nature.

3.4 Jude the Obscure (1895)

A drastic disintegration of old ideas always goes along with the radical change in social and economic life of the people. Christianity was attacked not only for its shaky philosophical basis, but also for its historical authenticity. The old concept of Divine Justice was rapidly abandoned. This ideological upheaval was brought about mainly by the evolutionary science of Darwin, one of the most revolutionary forces in the nineteenth century. It revolutionized man’s conception of himself, expanding his world not geographically but chronologically. This exerts a great influence on Hardy`s later belief, it shakes his belief, and this is expressed in Jude the Obscure—his last novel.

Hardy went on his writing career, and sometimes momentarily achieved, beliefs subversive of the whole established society. He felt a deep desire to “break up the present pernicious conventions in respect of manners, customs, religion, illegitimacy, the stereotyped household. Contemporary society recognized a revolutionary when it saw one.”[24] Driven by this, Hardy writes Jude the Obscure, with which he concludes his novel writing.

Jude has nothing to fall back on after his lover Sue leaves him; not God, and not Nature, which in many of Hardy`s earlier novels was seen as a comforting and strengthening force. Indeed in this novel Hardy says that Nature’s law is “mutual butchery”, and comments sadly on the scorn of Nature for man’s finer emotions, and her lack of interest in his aspirations. However, these emotions and aspirations are still facts. In this novel, the descriptions of Nature turned out to be seldom and grave. The characters in this setting (both natural and social) are doomed to end with an inevitable tragedy.

It is not surprising that the heroine Sue breaks and the hero Jude dies, since they’re both too sensitive and the pressures on them are too much to bear. In the story, the main happenings are: Jude’s unhappy marriage with Arabella, his difficult companionship with Sue, Sue`s marriage with Phillotson, Jude and Sue living together in spite of the brutal pressure of social conventions, the remarriage of Sue with Phillotson and Jude with Arabella, etc. Running through all these complicated connections is Jude`s struggle to enlarge his soul and live an ideal, spiritual life. Jude dreams of realizing his ideal first through his devotion to intellectual cultivation. This failed, he turns to theological learning and there again he is frustrated. At the same time his pursuit of free love also ends in defeat. An idealist rebelling against the overwhelming power of customs, conventions and social prejudices, Jude is doomed to a tragic ending.

Hardy`s presenting tragedy is caused by the dynamic and destructive tensions between character and environment. At the same time, it offers sharp and profound social messages. His deep insight into human nature and the dynamics between character and Nature, “gives his novels significance and a range of reference wider than that of a particular time and place.”[25]

Hardy`s men and women in these novels, worthy as they are, are destroyed by the combined forces of character and environment (both social and natural). “His fictional world is a reflection of his vision of the tragicalness of human existence.”[26] By the heroes and heroines` tragedies presented in those above novels, Hardy passes a message that man is part of Nature, and only when man live in harmony with Nature, can their aspirations be achieved! Otherwise, it would only be a tragic ending.

4. Conclusion

To sum up, we can find that the description of Nature by Hardy plays at least the following roles in his novels. Firstly, it helps the development of the plots. It foils the atmosphere of the plots, gives readers the hints of the characters` minds, and at the same time, it improves the vividness of the story and artistic charm, but not only as the setting of the story. Secondly, the charm of Nature by Hardy is due to its melting with the characters: Nature here owns the feeling of the characters, and is always interwoven with their activities and fate. The literature aims at presenting the characters. This is also where the readers` interest lies in. The description of Nature by the writer gets its meaning by the characters` taking part in (activities), and so own a social meaning. Finally, in our own age, when people have begun to think seriously about our alienation from Nature and its consequences, Hardy comes over as one who wanted to protect and preserve Nature. Through presenting the characters` life in the natural environment, he gives us a message that human should live in harmony with Nature, and it is only by so, can man achieve his\her aspirations. The relationship between Nature and human beings is an eternal theme to our mankind.

Bibliography

[1] Merryn Williams, A Preface to Hardy [M]. Peking: Peking University Press, 2005. P89

[2] Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native [M]. 北京: 外语教学与研究出版社, 1994. P175

[3] Elizabeth R. Nelson, ed. Far from the Madding Crowd [Z]. NY: Simon &. Schuster, 1982. P133

[4] 常耀信. A Survey of English Literature [M]. 天津: 南开大学出版社, 2006. P287

[5] 同[2] P6

[6] 同[2] P168

[7] 同[2] P168—169

[8] Shouhua Qi &. William. W. Morgan, Voices in Tragic Harmony—Essays on Thomas Hardy`s Fiction &. Poetry [M]. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2001. P47

[9] 同[2] P4

[10] Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of the Casterbridge [M].   北京: 外语教学与研究出版社, 1994. Pxxiv

[11] Dale Kramer, ed. Penny Boumelha, The patriarchy of class [A], The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy [C]. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 1999. P131—132

[12] 同[3] P30

[13] 何莲珍. 编译. 景物描写精萃[Z].   上海: 世界图书出版公司, 1914. P116

[14] Alastair Fowler, A History of English Literature [M].  Boston: Harvard University Press, 1987. P312

[15] Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d`Urbervilles [M].  Qingdao: Qingdao Press, 2005. P152--153

[16] 同[15] P135

[17] Dale Kramer, ed. Jakob Lothe, Variants on genre [A]. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy [C]. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 1999. P126

[18] 同[15] P87—88

[19] 同[13] P32--P34

[20] 同[1] P95

[21] 同[1] P97

[22] 曾令富. 哈代小说中的自然环境描写[J]. 四川教育学院学报, 2002, 7.  P22

[23] 同[8] P49

[24] Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure [M].   北京: 外语教学与研究出版社,1991. Pxxvi

[25] 同[8] P86—87

[26] 同[8] P85