A Pair of Blue Eyes: The Cliff-Scene and the Literary Sublime

In the most dramatic scene of A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), whilst poised both comically and cosmically on the Cliff Without a Name, Henry Knight encounters the defunct gaze of the trilobite, and Hardy observes that ‘separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death’. The hero feels himself to be ‘in the presence of personalised loneliness’ (PBE, 212), but even when facing death, as an amateur geologist he proceeds to consider ‘the varied scenes that had had their day between this creature’s epoch and his own’ (PBE, 214). In a passage indebted to Gideon Mantell’s The Wonders of Geology (1838), a copy of which Hardy had received from Horace Moule in 1858, Knight somewhat bizarrely envisions the story of the cliff-face: