A novelist's inner eye

I'm reading Thomas Hardy's "The Woodlanders," his own favorite and, at least for the first half I've read, a terrific novel even in comparison with his better-known classics. I love Hardy generally, and this book isn't letting me down in the least. I just ran across a passage that seems a perfect example of the kind of observation of the inner workings of human behaviour and emotion that for me is the height of the novel writer's art. Local Dr. Fitzpiers has just "made love" verbally to Grace Melbury.

"At moments there was something theatrical in the delivery of Fitzpiers's effusion; yet it would have been inexact to say that it was intrinsically theatrical. It often happens that in situations of unrestraint, where there is no thought of the eye of criticism, real feeling glides into a mode of manifestation not easily distinguishable from rodomontade. A veneer of affectation overlies a bulk of truth, with the evil consequence, if perceived, that the substance is estimated by the superficies, and the whole rejected."

When I read that passage, I had once again that treasured sensation: "ah-hah, I've felt that and now I am reminded of it for the first time." It seems to me that when I "made love" in this way, and caught myself, and thought "well, this is fake and overblown, but I believe I mean it," I thought too that this was a unique, personal experience. At some level I know that I have no unique types of emotional experience, that the human experience is a universal one and the "personal language," in the language-philosophical sense, does not exist. But I fool myself enough into believing such an experience is personal that I drop it in the wrong bin of memory and lose the chance to use it in my own writing - Hardy and the other great novelists call up these fine convolutions of human emotional experience, describe them and wow readers like me.

It is easy, it is common, to be satisfied with mockery in a situation like this, to caricature the man who speaks in hyperboles and poetry, to register an ironic distance between the love he describes and the feelings he actually possesses. It takes more, much more, the superhuman empathy and compassion of a Hardy or an Eliot, to look beyond that snarkery and see the poor man whose tongue runs away with him in part because his feelings are genuinely too much to easily fit into words.

The picture is Hardy at 16.