# The Life of Thomas Hardy (Brennecke)/Chapter 3

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CHAPTER III
The Soil (. . . 1850)
From this self-contained place rose in stealthy silence tall stems of smoke, which the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root on quiet hearth-stones festooned overhead with hams and flitches. It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in. inferences wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and closely knit interdependence of the lives therein.
BY many a literary incantation such as this has Thomas Hardy called into being and summoned up before his readers the Genii of his native country. Or, viewed from a slightly different angle, "Wessex" has been to him a vast stage upon which things both animate and inanimate have been woven together in comic and tragic patterns, as the winds of chance blew upon them, or as causal chains, stretching infinitely into the past, have determined them.
"Wessex" has been to Hardy primarily a land of associations. He never walked through it saying, "So, and so, and so, might events have complicated themselves—thus, and thus, in such a place." He rather imagined, "Here tragedies did actually play themselves out, and did actually lead on, and will always lead on, to further ​tragedies, in the manner foreordained by the Will." Under such a mental attitude the terrain came to life. Spirits dead, living, unborn, invested every stone, every tree, everything raised by the hand of man. The real involved itself inextricably with the spectre of the real.
Under such an emotional radiation, also, the past and the present must of necessity have become deeply involved with each other and interblended. The soil and its fruit: the ground itself, its vegetation, its animal life, its human product or parasite whose activities here and there resulted in physical denudations and excrescences: roads and ditches, churches and dwellings—all these have played both a real and a transcendental role in Hardy's cosmos. Hardy himself must be taken as a part of it, too.
"Wessex" can not be considered, then, merely as it reproduces itself photographically through human sensory reactions today. Its history must be invoked to cast over it something of the romantic glow in which Hardy's imagination has thrived. And not merely its conventional modern history alone, important as this may be, but even its geology and its prehistory.
Fishy beings of low development, then dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles, then shadowy, sinister crocodilian outlines: alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating in the colossal lizard, iguanodon—these beasties we must first imagine as peopling the more ancient geological deposits of southwestern England. Hardy's Henry Knight, hanging against the Clift With​out A Name, sees them all. Then huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium and the mylodon, also huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Such an uncouth rout of inhabitants constitutes the fantastically romantic animate prologue for the appearance of the first Wessex men: fierce creatures, living in mean times, although perhaps no meaner than the present. Clothed in hides of beasts and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, they "rose from the rock like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods and mud huts—perhaps in caves of the neighboring rocks." Dig down a few feet anywhere in Dorsetshire, and you will find the mute evidences of these bizarre races. Nineteenth Century science has bared them all to the vision of the romancer.
There followed wars and tumults. Tribes grew into nations. Life, then as now, tasted bitter; still men drank deeply of it, prolonged its deceptive hopes as effectively as they could. They attacked their neighbors, and erected elaborate defenses against them. Mai Dun, the result of years of toil, lakes of sweat and blood, reared up its grim ponderosity over the teeming green wilderness of the Frome Valley. Hundreds of tiny beings, Lilliputians in comparison with the colossal magnitude of their materialized ambitions, swarmed over the country in little bands and flocks, driven on by forces they could never understand.
Inspired by their awesome apprehension of a malignant, though perhaps only indifferent, spirit, brooding ​over their destiny, they carved huge boulders into symmetrical forms and erected monoliths and triliths. Some they dragged over to Salisbury Plain and there established their Temple to the Sun: vast concentric circles of stone, burning in the fierce heat of noonday, chill as death at midnight. Here at Stonehenge their vague terrors prompted them to offer the blood of their own sons and daughters to appease their instinctive and traditional concepts of a stern and outraged "justice." ("I think you are lying," says Angel to Tess, "on the very altar on which they offered their sacrifices." . . .)
The Wessex realm became a vaguely circumscribed district, bounded on the east and north by a line running from where Portsmouth now stands, over towards the sources of the Thames, and to the west, clear to Land's End. Here hoary legendary British kings ruled their rude people with passion and caprice, here bards chanted of blood and demons—while far to the southeast, along the shores of the Mediterranean, people were developing law, art, literature and philosophy. It is pleasant to dream, once remarked Hardy, that in some spot in the extensive tract named "Egdon" may be the hearth of that traditionary King of Wessex, Ina, afterwards named Lear. The storms that now howl about the ears of the belated nightly wayfarer on these barren moors, at any rate, are the identical tempests that puffed their cheeks and mercilessly goaded on the white-haired old monarch, a pathetic figure, mad, quite mad, a victim of man's eternal inhumanity to man.
Relentless legions of the Roman Caesars next left the imprint of their steel-shod heels over the country. ​Polished, gleaming metal, straight ranks and files of soldiery, shouting centurions, aristocratic Imperial officers—the harsh, precise machine mowed down all that stood in its path. Efficiency invaded the wilderness, for the first time—but not the last. The Britons were driven back, or enslaved, or carried off to Italy. Camps were laid out, their sites chosen scientifically. Bridges spanned the streams. Roads, hard as metal, white as marble, straight as spear-shafts, pierced through virgin woodlands.
The camps grew into towns, where people lived the orderly, virtuous lives of pioneers extending the frontiers of their nation. A precise language, with neatly interlocking combinations of long and short vowels and consonants, beautifully inflected, prevailed—a language which contained miraculous words that represented not only things and actions but generalized concepts. Self-consciousness and rigid logical thinking sought, with temporary success, to impress the face of the island, upon which time had thus far written but a shallow story, when all was told.
Justice was administered, business methods were ap plied to human intercourse. Regulated amusements provided controllable outlets for spirits that naturally and periodically craved excitement and stimulation. Amphitheatres were dug out of the verdant hillsides. Here were staged races, combats, pompous solemn processionals, perhaps even the comedies of Plautus and the tragedies of Seneca. Two miles—two thousand Roman paces—north of Mai Dun, sprang up the capital city of the Imperial province.
​A few hundred years passed—and then there remained but little more indication of this brazen impact than one can discover there today. Durnovaria became Durnover Field. The dry bones of the conquerors and masters were enclosed in the warm but indifferent embraces of the untamable soil. Pavements of tiles were overgrown with sod. Sheep grazed within Maumbry Rings; the slopes that had rung with triumphal shouts now protected fleecy backs from the gelid November winds. Hadrian's soldiery lay buried in shallow graves, their knees drawn up to their chins; herdsmen gaped dumbly at the curious upturned "skellintons."
From the east came Germanic marauders. The autochthonous Keltic warriors were driven further and further back—over into Wales, up into the hills of Scotland. Some of the chieftains held out in their stony strong-holds, miraculously parrying all onslaughts until they were exterminated, and thus the Arthurian legends were born. Blond Saxons, prevailing by numbers and savagery, built their settlements. The Cyning, with his grave Witenagemot and his shouting thegnas, at last succeeded in impressing the enduring countenance of Wessex, the land of the West-Saxons, with the spiritual aspect it bears today. Their Teutonic language, called the "Englisce spræce," unlocking its word-hoards, resounded through the raftered halls and the cultivated fields, to remain there practically unchanged by the vicissitudes of many centuries. Also their pagan Nordic superstitions, but thinly overlaid, eventually, with Christian celestial machinery. Wyrd, the inscrutable personification of Destiny, transplanted from Scandinavia, found ​Its new habitation much to Its liking. It awakened the fossilized monsters and dragons into a second existence; they lived again, as brooding shadows, magical, mysterious, terrible.
Hardy Danes, fiery and volatile people, charged over from the southeast coast; their raids harried the land. Æthelstan, Ælfred, Æthelred, sober kings and true, spent their lives pruning their spear-hedges in continuous campaigns of defence. Mounds that had served the Stone-Age men, the Britons and the Romans in turn, were again used as barriers against the invading marauders. Peace approached on belated pinions.
Missionaries had arrived from Rome; the barbarians were gradually won over to baptism and to lip-service of the Lord, His Risen Son, the Virgin Mother and the Holy Saints. Church towers bore aloft the Sign of the Cross. But Wyrd, unconquered, brooding, nursing its monsters in the hearts of the land-folk, smiled grimly through it all.
Henceforward the history of Wessex becomes the history of the English nation. The Dukes of Normandy, having vanquished the last of the Saxon monarchs, imposed their feudal lordship over the country. Ecclesiastical architecture of the Perpendicular type dominated the towns.
For more than seven centuries, this Anglo-Norman civilization held sway. The Hardys had arrived and were proliferating. The Swetmans and the Childses, by dint of Habsburgian intermarrying, had populated the heart of Wessex, covered it with substantial barns and houses of stone, built to endure for many generations.
​The Nineteenth Century crept nearer. Across the Channel, off the southwest coast, a great Gallic nation was in the throes of popular turmoil, social upheaval and political rebirth. England throbbed sympathetically: everywhere, throughout the land, patrols of scarlet-coated military were on view, passing to and fro, in and out of billets and barracks, as foreign campaigns swiftly followed one another. Hanoverian gaiety, in the person and the court of the Third George, invaded the seaside towns. Weymouth resounded with martial music and with sprightly, rippling dances whose echoes were sensed even in the quiet villages of the interior. But it was a liveliness impregnated with anxiety. The Ogre of Corsica, savage "Boney," threatened to land his thousands of devils from his fleet of flat-bottomed rafts; his name was coupled with the Evil One's; his image terrorized children into obedience. Beacons were prepared as signals of the dreaded landing, on the summits of the ancient Dorset barrows. Recruiting and impressing for Lord Nelson's navy affrighted the mothers and lovers of lusty youngsters.
The even flow of rural life was scarcely disturbed by the tumult, however. Foreign affairs, being invisible, even if real, were lumped together with all the other real but invisible things: with ogres and witches, with dragons and magic potions. The shepherds, pine-planters, ploughmen, furze-cutters, dairymen, went about their daily tasks just as they had for centuries. Ballads and folk-tales were still transmitted orally, substantially the same, in content and handling, as they had been in pre-Elizabethan days.
​The country girls and swains danced around the pole on May Day; on Christmas Eve, when the oxen were supposed to be on their knees in the stables, the waits went about chanting old noels; conjurors were consulted at dead of night; the old play of St. George, beginning with the lines,
periodically slaked the popular thirst for the drama; people who were intensely disliked, or whose manner of living provoked criticism, were subjected to "skimmity-riding"; to pierce a waxen image of one's enemy with needles and to melt it over a fire while reciting the Lord's Prayer backwards three times was considered equivalent to murder and damnation.
"Superstitions linger longest on these heavy soils," Hardy has remarked of the central Vale of Blackmore. "Having once been forest, at this shadowy time it seemed to assert something of its old character, the far and the near being blended, and every tree and tall hedge making the most of its presence. The harts that had been hunted here; the witches that had been pricked and ducked; the green-spangled fairies;—the place teemed with beliefs in them still, and they formed an impish multitude now."
Thus paganism lingered on through the early part of the last century. The folk were church-goers, of course, and their speech was punctuated by frequent turns of phrase out of the Bible and Prayer Book. Their clergy forced them to maintain the proper respect for the cere​monies that had been imported, established and adhered to by their fathers for hundreds of years. In church they professed much, but believed very little; in the dim chambers of conjurors they professed little, but believed much—and that with shaking and dread. Fetichism ran far ahead of traditional ritual and dogmatism.
Such was the Wessex that Hardy loved from the earliest to the latest days of his life. He loved the country both for itself and for its associations, but he loved the countryman for himself alone. Hardy's peasant was, as Lionel Johnson justly remarked, neither a Strephon nor a Hodge, neither Arcadian nor clown; he was just as he was. Yet his possibilities were unlimited. Twice, at least, did Hardy give recognition to his recognition of these potentialities: in one of his rare interviews, signed by a "quondam country parson" in 1892, and in Tess. Here is a composite rendition of both:
"As to 'Hodge,' I have never met him. The conventional farm-folk of the imagination—personified by the pitiable figure known as Hodge—are soon obliterated from the consciousness of the just observer. At close quarters no Hodge is to be seen. At first, it is true, rustic ideas, modes and surroundings may appear retrogressive and unmeaning. But living on there, day after day, the acute sojourner becomes conscious of a new aspect in the spectacle. Without any objective change whatever, variety takes the place of monotonousness. As the folk become intimately known, they begin to differentiate ​themselves as in a chemical process. The typical and unvarying Hodge ceases to exist. He has been disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-creatures—beings of many minds, beings infinite in difference; some happy, many serene, a few depressed, one here and there bright even to genius, some stupid, others wanton, others austere; some mutely Miltonic, some potentially Cromwellian; into men who have private views of each other, as the observer has of his friends; who can applaud or condemn each other, amuse or sadden themselves by the contemplation of each other's foibles or vices; men everyone of whom walks in his own individual way the road to dusty death."
These people of Hardy's, one may be reasonably sure, composed the actual Wessex "backbone," at least until about 1860. Additional illumination of a brilliant quality is thrown over this picture by Hardy's remarks on the country clergy. The fact that he delivered them to a "quondam parson" may have colored them somewhat charitably, but still he sounded the note of sincerity when he said:
"Great credit is due to the parson, who, in my opinion, does much to keep up the interest in these quiet villages. It would be a thousand pities that such men, educated, sympathetic, original-minded as many of them are, should be banished by looming difficulties of dogma, and the villages given over to the narrow-mindedness and the lack of charity of some lower class of teacher."
"How, then," asked his interlocutor, "do you explain the great dislike that exists in the rural breast for the parson?" To which Hardy replied:
​"I think he is so disliked, where he is disliked, more on account of his friendship with the squire and the powers that be; because he teaches a theology which they cannot square with the facts of life. The Liberationist Society are on the wrong tack; let them liberate the parson from his theology, not the parish from the parson."
Throughout his literary career, indeed, Hardy continually recognized the great power of the parson for both good and evil in the community. His first picture of the pastor, in Desperate Remedies, is a consistently sympathetic one. Contrasted with this presentation of the clergyman as a force which worked for good in the physical and spiritual life of the district is the portrait of Mr. Swancourt in A Pair of Blue Eyes, a petty dignitary whose social prejudices and altogether selfish propensities have much to do with the hastening on of the catastrophe of the story, and constitute proper vehicles for a cynical presentation of the futility and occasional malignity of the representatives of the Church. The more neutral characterizations of Angel Clare's father in Tess and of Parson Maybold in Under the Greenwood Tree are indicative of Hardy's more tolerant moods when reacting to the country clergy—although the picture is scarcely complete without the addition of that biting "satire of circumstance,” In Church, a truly diabolical, sardonic glimpse:
And from first to last the poet exercised no patience with the theology taught by the wearers of holy orders. In his enthusiasm for the countryman Hardy has often been compared with Wordsworth, but that his understanding of the native heart and mind was infinitely superior to that of the great optimistic nature-poet has been shown rather conclusively by the great esteem and friendliness that the farm and working people of his own district have always felt for him. According to "John O'London," he "sees a peasant culture from his own art, and the Wessex villagers greet him as their Prospero, whose staff must one day be broken and buried, but whose book will never be drowned." It will be remembered that the country folk of the Lake district literally ran before the approach of Wordsworth (meditative, benevolent, wordy and moral sage that he was), who, for all his sympathy, seems to have lacked a real understanding of the man of the soil. His philosophy of the rustic heart was one drawn largely out of books and easy-chair meditation rather than from the actual experience with material contact with his clouted subjects. Hardy's sym​pathy, on the other hand, was always that of the fellow-worker and fellow-sufferer, no matter how clear-sighted and aristocratic he remained within himself.
The Dorset language itself has been enshrined with both exactness and artistic feeling in the "dialect" verse written by the Rev. William Barnes of Winterbourne. Hardy's interests in the past and present of the country, of the people and of the speech of Wessex, as well as in the art of poetry in and for itself, were united in his enthusiasm for the figure and work of this remarkable poet. Born in 1800, Barnes had lived his whole life among the Wessex folk; like Hardy he had become enamored of the ancient dialect, had learnt to penetrate into the highways and byways of the rural heart, and, like Hardy again, had easily won the admiration of his country parishioners through his deep sympathy and keen insight into their ways, which he could at will adopt as his own, and make the feelings and expressions of the peasant a part of himself. It is said that his most appreciative audiences did not consist of cultivated readers, charmed with the "quaintness" and "naivete" of his dialect lyrics, but of the users of the dialect themselves, delighted with the truthfulness and naturalness of his poetry and of his manner of reading it.
Although well equipped to apply himself to the evolution, grammar and etymology of the Dorset language with all the scientific intensity of the professional philologer, he seems to have been able to retain the simple ​point of view of the uncultured Dorset rustic and to associate with him on terms of the greatest familiarity. In this respect he and Hardy were kindred spirits. His best creative work, the Poems of Rural Life, appeared in 1879, and drew forth an enthusiastic review from Hardy in the New Quarterly Magazine for October of that year—it was the only review that Hardy ever wrote. When Barnes died in 1886, Hardy wrote the eloquent obituary article in the Athenænum. The following poetic tribute can also be discovered in Hardy's Moments of Vision. It is called The Last Signal (Oct. 11, 1886)—A Memory of William Barnes:
Silently I footed by an uphill road That led from my abode to a spot yew-boughed; Yellowly the sun sloped down to westward, And dark was the east with cloud.
Then, below the shadow of that livid sad east, Where the light was least, and a gate stood wide, Flashed back the fire of the sun that was facing it, Like a brief blaze on that side.
Looking hard and harder I knew what it meant— The sudden shine sent from the livid east scene; It meant the west mirrored by the coffin of my friend there, Turning to the road from his green,
To take his last journey forth—he who in his prime Trudged so many attune from that gate athwart the land! Thus a farewell to me he signalled on his grave-way, As with a wave of his hand.
(Winterborne-Came Path)
While it would be very difficult indeed to exaggerate the purely literary influence of Barnes, especially over Hardy's early activity as a lyric poet, it must be clearly understood at the outset that of intellectual influence there was practically none. Hardy's consistently revolutionary and irreconcilable attitude both towards the organized social world and towards the first principles manifesting themselves in the tragic features of life found no inspiration or nourishment in the devout and mellow mood of reverent acceptance running through all of the clergyman's work. He himself hinted at this fundamental distinction between the two general viewpoints in the obituary article:
Unlike Burns, Beranger, and other poets of the people, Mr. Barnes never assumed the high conventional style; and he entirely leaves alone ambition, pride, despair, defiance and others of the grander passions which move mankind great and small. His rustics are, as a people, happy people, and very seldom feel the sting of the rest of modern mankind—the disproportion between the desire for serenity and the power of obtaining it. One naturally thinks of Crabbe in this connexion; but though they touch at points, Crabbe goes much further than Barnes in questioning the justice of circumstance.
Great as is the gulf between Barnes and Crabbe, it is far exceeded by that between Crabbe and Hardy. Even the country-folk among Hardy's characters often give expression to opinions which smack of the Satanic rather than the traditional view of the world and its Creator. Hardy gave generous praise to Barnes, however, for having contented himself with the presentation of the simple attitudes of the wielders of the hoe. A significant para​graph in the preface which he wrote in 1908 for the Select Poems of Barnes reads:
Dialect, it may be added, offered another advantage to him as a writer, whatever difficulties it may have for strangers who try to follow it. Even if he often used the dramatic form of peasant speakers as a pretext for the expression of his own mind and experiences—which cannot be doubted—yet he did not always do this, and the assumed characters of husbandman and hamleteer enabled him to elude in his verse those dreams and speculations that cannot leave alone the mystery of things—possibly an unworthy mystery and disappointing if solved, though one that has a harrowing fascination for many poets,—and helped him to fall back on dramatic truth, by making his personages express the notions of life prevalent in their sphere.
There can certainly be no doubt about the harrowing fascination that the mystery of things has always possessed for Hardy, and none about the vigorous and outspoken way he sometimes chose to express his personal reaction to it.
Widely separated as the two poets were in the matter of faith and its expression in their literary works, they approached each other very closely when they turned the eye of sympathetic observation upon the simple people and the simple details of country life. Here we find the effect of the older man's kindly attitude to have been a mighty influence over the young iconoclast. Outside of his admiration for recognized masters, such as the Greek tragic dramatists, the Old Testament poets, Shakespeare, Shelley, Goethe and Schopenhauer, the only great literary enthusiasm displayed by Hardy was for the unassuming work of Barnes—and this despite the self-evident ​differences between their fundamental ideas. The sympathy between the two, therefore, in those matters where sympathy really existed, must have been very strong indeed.
With regard to the most obvious bond that connected the two, namely, their attachment to and employment of the dialect, a cursory investigation reveals the fact that, superficially at least, their use of the native tongue differed. The Barnes poems require a glossary, such as that supplied by Hardy, for the reader unacquainted with the dialect, while the dialogue of Hardy's rustics can be readily followed by anyone who can read standard English. Barnes aimed at much closer and more exact reproduction, orthographically, of the pure dialect: he consistently printed "z" for the voiced "s"-sound (the effect of which was not intended to be humorous), and "v" for the voiced "f"; and he used many more words found only in Dorset and not in London English.
Except for the early Wessex ballad, The Bride-Night Fire, or, as it was first called, The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's, in which he came closest to a real reproduction of the Barnes matter and expression, Hardy used the dialect in far freer fashion. For this further corruption of what was considered by many only a corruption of the accepted language, he was severely criticised. He answered his critics in his letter to the Athenæum of November 30, 1878, in which he protested that his aim was primarily to depict men and women and their natures rather than their dialect forms, and that an accurate phonetic transcription of their actual speech would only emphasize a grotesqueness really nonexistent. Thus he ​justified what may still seem a curious compromise between scientifically naturalistic speech-reproduction and unscientific cross-fertilization of two distinct languages.
This inexactness and license in the employment of what was so carefully, accurately and jealously recorded in the work of Barnes was amply atoned for by Hardy's greater richness in the use of rural idioms and by his very generous paraphrases of characteristic, revealing turns of speech. Barnes, on the other hand, frequently forsook the simplicity and the naive rustic euphuism so delightfully indulged in by Hardy's countrymen, and decked out their language with the cut and dried flowers of traditional book-rhetoric. The flowers in the speech of William Worm, Joseph Poorgrass, Grandfer Cantle and their associates are always fresh, spontaneous, and of the wild and uncultivated variety. But although Hardy never violated the peasant character himself, he thus defended Barnes's practice:
What is the use of saying, as has been said of Barnes, that compound epithets like "the blue-hill'd worold," "the white horn'd cow," "the grey-topp'd heights of Paladore," are a high-handed enlargement of the ordinary ideas of the fieldfolk into whose mouths they are put? These things are justified by the art of every age when they can claim to be, as here, singularly precise and beautiful definitions of what is signified; which in these instances, too, apply with double force to the deeply tinged horizon, to the breed of kine, to the aspect of Shaftesbury Hill, characteristic of the Yale within which most of his revelations are enshrined.
Both authors were united on insisting upon the view that the Dorset dialect was, and always had been, a real ​language and not a corruption; but it should be noted that, as Hardy pointed out in his preface, Barnes strained at times the capacity of dialect in his "aim at closeness of phrase to his vision, and went wilfully outside the dramatization of peasant talk." He went on to observe, "Whether or no, by a felicitous instinct, he does at times break into sudden irregularities in the midst of his subtle rhythms and measures, as if feeling rebelled against further drill. Then his self-consciousness ends, and his naturalness is saved."
The two principles of poetic diction mentioned above and admired by Hardy in Barnes were never forsaken by the younger poet. The aim at "closeness of phrase to vision" is a characteristic of Hardy's verse from the earliest of his Wessex Poems to the latest of his Late Lyrics. Likewise the poet's liberty to break into sudden irregularities of metre when feeling rebels against drill, although not frequently indulged in by Barnes, is a significant quality to find winning the admiration of Hardy. It seems to indicate a certain duality of personality in him as a writer: on the one hand, the tinge of austere reaction which made him an admirer of the smooth flow, the liquid verse and the common ideas of the Cavalier lyrists; on the other hand, the frequent contrasting display of metric irregularity and a deliberate sacrifice of melody to the pungency of the thought to be expressed.
The poems of Barnes are chiefly distinguished by their extreme regularity of metre, their great beauty of language, their smooth and skilful handling of words and by their fine idyllic quality, sometimes mingled with pathos, but hardly ever with the sting of real tragedy. ​The events portrayed are those most common in rural life: courtings, weddings and deaths; and in their portrayal dramatic fire and tension are nearly always absent. For their quaint and felicitous expression of a poet's real joy in the countryside, in the approach of spring, in familiar scenes and faces and in the cheerful winter's fireside, these poems really deserve to be widely known.
The broad dialect can be observed at its best in The Gre't Woah Tree That's in the Dell. Here the effect of beauty and pathos is admirably rendered by images at once simple and meaningful. A typical Hardy-motif is sounded in Minden House, which tells of a youth's falling in love with a farmer's daughter, and closes as follows:
Here personified time is represented as a benign influence, a dispenser of good fortune to the youth. In Hardy's early verse, time is also personified, and acts in collaboration with "Chance" in bestowing fortune upon the poet—but never good fortune, as here. Hardy sees Time wearing a malignant, or at best a neutral, countenance; never a propitious one.
It is interesting to compare Hardy's Ditty for E. L. G. (Emma Lavinia Gifford, his first wife), written in 1870 and included in Wessex Poems, with Barnes's Maid o' Newton, whom the poet meets "by happy chance, or doom." Further than this the theme of the vagaries of ​chance, so often stressed by Hardy, was never developed by his forerunner.
Barnes's Wife A-Lost is a simple and touching lament, with an expression of the Christian's simple faith at the end. Angels by the Door has a slight touch of that fatalism which Hardy has always been ready to recognize as instinctive to the countryman's heart. Angels and days—Hardy's Chance and Time—bring good and evil in turn, says the poet, but there is no bitterness, but comfort rather, in the reflection:
The very tragic theme of the seduced and forsaken woman is handled in The Weepen Lady. Common enough in Hardy, this motif is unusual in Barnes, who presents the poor unfortunate as cast out by her father; but, ever faithful to her child, her spirit will not forsake her old home. The conclusion is not Hardyan:
Another interesting and unusual lyric is The Love-Child, an expression of commiseration with the sad lot of an illegitimate child—again a fairly frequent theme with Hardy, but a very rare outburst for Barnes. He has perhaps given it even a more outspokenly passionate treatment than it might have received at Hardy's hands, especially in the glowing apostrophes of the final stanza:
The humorous poems of Barnes contain no exuberance of spirits, nor violent or riotous fun, but maintain merely a fair level of geniality, as in the pleasant eclogue, the Sly Bit o' Coorten of John and Fanny. Hardy's humor, as we find it in the more whimsical anecdotes in A Few Crusted Characters, calls forth the reader's smile much more readily; occasionally it is downright uproarious.
Popular beliefs and folklore such as Hardy delighted to weave into his stories can be found in A Witch and in the eclogue The Vearries.
Blaake's House in Blackmwore is a piece that must have excited the interest of Hardy, as it presents a very palpable poetic analogy to his own first published piece of prose, How I Built Myself a House. It tells the story of the building of a countryman's house and of his first housewarming, in very effective, high-spirited verse, decked out with many ingenious internal rhymes.
Human nature was pictured by Barnes as being essentially good—and usually as sturdy and unflinching under the buffetings of the external world. Even in False Friends-Like, wherein the rustic singer announces his possession of wisdom by experience, in his distrust of the ​motives of over-friendly men (remembering a trick played upon him years ago by an older boy who invited him to ride in a barrow and then overturned him into a puddle), he retains his good humor throughout, only remarking cunningly, when offered unearned favors:
Even fundamentally unattractive characters like "Old Gruffmoody Grim" are regarded in a humorous and roughly tolerant manner.
These kindly Barnes-personages were not without their softening effect upon Hardy's work. William Dewy, in Under the Greenwood Tree, for instance, is a typical Barnes-peasant. "His was a humorous and kindly nature, not unmixed with a frequent melancholy; and he had a firm religious faith." In his poetic treatment of such themes as the love-child, however, Hardy showed himself as colder and more dispassionate than Barnes, as more calculating and as less spontaneous, although he undoubtedly felt the tragedy of the situation far more deeply. This distinction between the two poets is clearly reflected in Hardy's verse-patterns, which, in comparison with the regularity of Barnes's, strike one at first as curiously ungainly and outlandish in their rhythmic flavor. What the older poet did teach was the employment of the greatest care and the exercise of the closest attention to detail in versification. So carefully was Hardy's earliest verse worked out and perfected that he selected much of it for inclusion in his Twentieth Century volumes. Above all, it was the attitude of both ​men towards their common native district, as expressed in Barnes's very fine Praise o' Dorset, that formed the chief spiritual link between them.
Barnes and Barnes's people, the ancient country life with its folklore, superstitions and language, constituted the human surface of the Wessex into which Hardy was born, and in the midst of which he lived his most impressionable years. But this was the old Wessex; it did not survive the century unchanged. Bailway lines cut into the rural stretches, more devastating in their effects than the ancient Boman highways. Other impacts of latter-day scientific civilization followed in the form of machinery and factories and motor cars. And of recent years, the proud visage of Egdon Heath itself has been lacerated by the cruel manœuvres of army tanks.
Even more violent than this bitter physical etching of the landscape were the more subtle spiritual changes which have been working continuously and with increasing intensity and momentum throughout the last seventy-five years. "Enlightenment" and humanitarianism and popular education have been stamping out the antique beliefs and primitive customs of the people. Modern science and "art" have been remolding their conduct.
Formerly the church-music in the villages was discoursed by the rustic instrumental choirs, with their viols, hautboys and "serpents"—and the same choirs officiated at hilarious country dances. Now they have been supplanted—first by barrel-organs, later by wheezy reed​harmoniums played by native girls who had gained their technique in the larger towns, finally by solemn pipe-instruments. To Hardy, this passing of the old and quaint spelled tragedy: Orpheus had been deposed by St. Cecilia.
The ancient weather-caster, working by divination, was supplanted by the official weather bureaux, working according to meteorological principles. An actual "skimmington" or "skimmity-ride" took place as late as 1884 in a Dorset village—but such things are now no more. Hardy himself has described to William Archer the unforgettable effect produced on him while still very young, by the sight of a man in the stocks, "sitting in the scorching sunshine, with the flies crawling over him." Today one looks in vain for a scene such as this—which may not really be a bad thing.
Varied emotions are aroused by the gradual decay of the Dorset speech, now but seldom heard. Hardy deplored it, saying:
Since Barnes's death, education in the west of England as elsewhere has gone on with its silent and inevitable effacement, reducing the speech of this country to uniformity, and obliterating every year many a tine local word. The process is always the same: The word is ridiculed by the newly-taught; it gets into disgrace; it is heard in holes and corners only; it dies; and, worst of all, it leaves no synonym. In the villages that one recognizes to be the scenes of these pastorals the poet's nouns, adjectives and idioms daily cease to be understood by the younger generation, the luxury of four demonstrative pronouns, of which Barnes was so proud, vanishes by their compression into the two of common English, and the suffix to verbs which marks continuity of action is almost everywhere shorn away.
The whole situation was summed up in Hardy's recognition of the gulf that he saw widening between his generation and that of his father; between the generation of Tess and that of her mother:
Between the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folk-lore, dialect and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter, with her trained National teachings and Sixth Standard knowledge under an infinitely Revised Code, there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily understood. When they were together the Elizabethan and Victorian ages stood juxtaposed.
The Wessex of Hardy's spirit was the Elizabethan one, and it was firmly rooted through many even pre-Elizabethan strata. His Wessex was the Wessex of the past. His Nature, cruel and savage as She was, he preferred as She first appeared to him, largely unreconstructed by the grimy hand of man. One must attempt to penetrate the Hardy-soil something after the manner so sketchily outlined here, in order to appreciate the complication of forces which compelled the poet to indite passages like the following, from the seventh chapter of The Woodlanders: