THE HEART OF THE HARDY COUNTRY

Dorchester is not only the capital of Dorset: it is also the chief town of the Hardy Country. The ancient capital of Wessex was Winchester: the chief seat of this literary domain is here, beside the Frome. Four miles distant from it the novelist was born, and at Max Gate, Fordington, looking down upon Dorchester’s roofs, he resides.

The old country life still closely encircles the county town, and on market-days takes the place by storm; so that when, by midday, most of the carriers from a ten or fifteen miles radius have deposited their country folk, and the farmers have come in on horseback, or driving, or perhaps by train, the slighter forms, less ruddy faces, and more urban dress of the townsfolk are lost amid the great army of occupation that from farms, cottages, dairies, and sheep-pastures, has for the rest of the day taken possession of the streets. The talk is all of the goodness or badness of the hay crop, the prospects of the harvest, how swedes are doing, and the condition of cows, sheep, and pigs; or, if it be on toward autumn, when the hiring of farm-labourers, shepherds, and rural servants in general for the next twelve months is the engrossing topic, then the scarcity of hands and their extravagant demands are the themes of much animated talk.

Dorchester faithfully at such times reflects the image of Dorset, and Dorset remains to this day, and long may it so remain, a great sheep-breeding and grazing county, and equally great as a land of rich dairies. From that suburb of Fordington, which has for so very many centuries been a suburb that to those who know it the name bears no suburban connotation, you may look down, as from a cliff-top, and see the river Frome winding away amid the rich grazing pastures, and with one ear hear the cows calling, while with the other the cries of the newspaper boys are heard in the streets of the town. The scent of the hay and the drowsy hum of the bees break across the top of the bluff, and, just as one may read, in the exquisite description of these things in the pages of The Mayor of Casterbridge, the dandelion and other winged seeds float in at open windows. One may sometimes from this point, when the foliage of its dense screen of trees grows thin, see Stinsford, the “Mellstock” of that idyllic tale, Under the Greenwood Tree; but in general you can see nothing of that sequestered spot until you have reached the by-lane out of the main road from Dorchester, and, turning there to the right, come to Stinsford Church, along a way made a midday twilight by those trees which render the title of that story so descriptive.

Stinsford Church. (Mellstock)

Blue wood-smoke, curling up from cottage chimneys against the massed woodlands that surround Kingston House, grey church, largely ivy-covered and plentifully endowed with grotesque gurgoyles—these, with school-house and scattered cottages, make the sum-total of Stinsford, or “Mellstock.” The school-house is that of the young school-mistress, Fancy Day, in the story; and suggests romance; but the sentimental pilgrim may be excused for being of opinion that it is all in the book, with perhaps nothing left over for real life. At any rate, passing it, as the scholars within are, like bees, in Mr. Hardy’s words, “humming small,” one does not linger, but speculates more or less idly which was the cottage where Tranter Dewy lived, and which that of Geoffrey Day, the keeper of Yalbury Great Wood. There are not, after all, many cottages to choose from, and Mr. Hardy has so largely peopled his stories from Mellstock that each one might well be a literary landmark. The Fiddler of the Reels, Mop Ollamoor, a rustic Paganini, whose diabolical cleverness with his violin is the subject of a short story, lived in one of these thatched homes of rural content, and in another was born unhappy Jude the Obscure. In each one of the rest you can imaginatively find the home of a member of that famous Mellstock choir, whose performances and enthusiasm sometimes rose so “glorious grand” that those who wrought with stringed instruments almost sawed through the strings of fiddle and double-bass, and those others whose weapons were of brass blew upon them until they split the seams of their coats and sent their waistcoat-buttons flying with the force of their fervid harmony, in the cumulative strains of Handel and the dithyrambics of Tate and Brady. “Oh! for such a man in our parish,” was thought to be the admiratory attitude of the parson at the fortissimo outburst of a minstrel from a neighbouring village, who had taken a turn with the local choir; but the parson’s pose was less one of admiration than of startled surprise.

All the members of that harmonious, if at times too vigorous, choir are gone to the land where, let us hope, they are quiring in the white robes and golden crowns usually supposed to be the common wear “up along”; and their instruments are perished too:

The knight is dust, his sword is rust,
His soul is with the saints, we trust.

Or, as Mr. Hardy, in Friends Beyond, says of his own creations:

William Dewy, Tranter Reuben,
Farmer Ledlow late at plough,
Robert’s kin, and John’s, and Ned’s,
And the Squire and Lady Susan
Lie in Mellstock churchyard now.

The clergy, who were responsible for the disappearance of the old choirs, did not succeed at one stroke in sweeping them away, and in many parishes it was not until the leader had died that they broke up the old rustic harmony. “The ‘church singers,’ who played anthems, with selections ‘from Handel, but mostly composed by themselves,’ had a position in their parish. They had an admiring congregation. Their afternoon anthem was the theme of conversation at the church porch before the service, and of enquiry and critical disquisition after. ‘And did John,’ one would ask, ‘keep to his time?’ ‘Samuel was crowding very fitly until his string broked.’ This was said after a performance difficult in all the categories in which difficulty—close up even to impossibility—may be found. And there was, I was about to say, a finale, but it seemed endless; it was a concluding portion, and a long one, of the anthem.

“Mary began an introductory recapitulation, in which she was ably followed, of the words, the subject of the composition, the masterpiece of one, or many, if the choir had lent a helping hand. It happened that Mary had to manage three full syllables, and all the cadences, and trills, and quavers connected therewith, as a solo. Then followed, through all the turns of the same intricate piece, Thomas, of tenor voice, who evolved his music, but did not advance to any elucidation of the subject of his concluding effort. He only dwelt upon the same syllables, at which the good minister was seen to smile and become restless, particularly when Jonathan took on with his deep bass voice, accompanied by the tones he drew from his bass-viol. He, as best suited a bass singer, slowly repeated the syllables that Mary and Thomas had produced in so many ways, and with such a series of intonations, ‘OUR—GREAT—SAL.’ May some who tittered at this canonisation of, as it were, a female saint, be forgiven!’ Had they waited a few minutes, the grand union of all the performers in loud chorus would have enlightened them to the fact that the last syllable was only the first of one of three ending in ‘vation,’ which would be loudly repeated by the whole choir till they appeared fairly tired out.”

The very last surviving vestige of the old village choirs of the West of England became extinct in 1893. Until then the startled visitor from London, or indeed any other part of a country by that time given over to harmoniums in chapels, cheap and thin organs in small churches, and more full-toned ones in larger, would have found the village choir of Martinstown still bass-viol and fiddle-scraping, flute-blowing, and clarionet-playing, as their forefathers had been wont to do. “Martinstown” is the style by which Wessex folk, not quite equal to the constant daily repetition of the name of Winterborne St. Martin, know that village, a little to the west of Dorchester. It is a considerable place and by no means remote, and it was therefore not the general inaccessibility of Martinstown to modern ideas that caused this survival, when every other parish had put away such things. Martinstown then provided itself with an organ, as understood to-day; and so escaped a middle period to which many another parish fell a victim, between the decay of the old church music and the adoption of the new. When, about the accession of Queen Victoria, village minstrelsy began to relax, there came in a fashion, or rather a scourge, of mechanical barrel-organs, fitted to play a dozen or fewer, sacred tunes, according to the local purse, or the local requirements. Precisely like secular barrel organs, save only in the matter of the tunes they were constructed to play, church minstrelsy with them not only became mechanical but singularly unvaried, for, when your dozen tunes were played, there was nothing for it—if, like Oliver Twist, the congregation called for more—but to grind the same things over again. The only variety—and that was one not covenanted for—was when portions of the melody-producing works decayed and broke off. A tooth missing from a cog-wheel, or something wrong with the barrel, was apt to give an ungodly twist to the Old Hundredth, calculated to impart a novelty to that ancient stand-by of village churches, and would even have made the air of “Onward, Christian Soldiers!” stream forth in spasms, as though those soldiers were an awkward squad learning some ecclesiastical goose-step. In short, the barrel-organs were not “things seemly and of good report,” and they presently died the death.

Many regretted the old order of things, largely destroyed by the current movements in the Church. Reforming High Churchmen had seized upon the signs of weakness exhibited in the old choirs, and had made away with them wherever possible. The rustic music had, as we have seen, its humorous incidents, but it was enthusiastic and was understood and sympathised with by the people. Surpliced choirs, and others, formed as they now commonly are, from classes superior to those of which the old instrumental and vocal choirs were composed, have not that hold upon congregations, who do not sing, as the Prayer-book and the Psalm enjoin, but listen while others do the singing for them.

“Why, daze my old eyes,” said a Wessex rustic, reviewing the trend of modern life, “everything’s upsey-down. ’Tis, if ye want this and if ye want that, put yer hand in yer pocket and goo an’ git some’un to do’t for ye, or goo to the Stowers (he meant the Stores) up to Do’chester, and buy yer ’taters and have’m sint home for ’ee, cheaper’n ye can grow’m, let be the back-breakin’ work of a hoein’ of ’em, and a diggin’ of ’em and a clanin’ of ’em. An’ talking of church, why bless ’ee, tidden no manner of good yer liftin’ up yer v’ice glad-like, an’ makkin’ a cheerful noise onto the Lord, as we’m bidden to do. Not a bit. Ef ye do’t passon looks all of a pelt, and they boys in their nightshirts sets off a-sniggerin’ and they tells yer ye bissen much of a songster, they ses.”

It has already been said that the instruments, as well as the old village players of them, have perished, but at least one specimen of that oddly named instrument, the “serpent,” frequently mentioned by Mr. Hardy, has survived. This example is in the possession of Messrs. H. Potter & Co., of West Street, Charing Cross Road. The serpent belongs to such a past order of things that, like the rebecs, dulcimers, and shawms of Scriptural references, it requires explanation.

The “serpent,” then, it may be learned, although invented by one Guillaume so far back as the close of the sixteenth century, first came into general use in the early part of the eighteenth. It was a wind instrument, the precursor of the bass horn, or ophicleide, which in its turn has been superseded by the valved bass brasses of the present day. The serpent of course owed its name to its contorted shape. It was generally made of wood, covered with leather, and stained black, and ranged in length from about twenty-nine to thirty-three inches. The earlier form of serpent had but six holes, but these were gradually increased, and keyed, until this now obsolete instrument, as improved by Key, of London, about the beginning of the nineteenth century, finally became possessed of seventeen keys. It went out of use, contemporaneously with the decay of the old village choirs, about 1830.

The geographical area of the heart of the Hardy Country is not very great, but the difficulties of finding one’s way about it are not small. The Vale of Great Dairies opens out, and the many runnels of the Frome make the byways so winding that to clearly know whither one is going demands the use of a very large-scale Ordnance Map. But to lose one’s self here is no disaster. You will find your way out again, and in the meanwhile will have come into intimate touch with dairying, and perhaps, if it be early summer, will find the barns and the waterside busy with sheepshearers. Seeing the dexterous shearing, the quick, practised movements of the men and the panting helplessness of the sheep, one is reminded of the similar scene in Far from the Madding Crowd.

Away across the Frome is the rustic, out-of-the-way village of West Stafford, which has a little one-aisled church, still displaying the royal arms of the time of Queen Elizabeth with that semÉe of lilies, the empty boast of a sovereignty over France, which, to the contemplative and sentimental student of history is as pitiful a make-believe as that of penury apeing affluence. “That glorious Semper Eadem,” motto, “our banner and our pride,” as Macaulay says, looks a little flatulent in these circumstances of a relaxed grasp.

The long rhymed inscription outside an off-licence beerhouse in the village, displaying the Hardyean phrase of “a cup of genuine” for a glass of ale, is a curiosity in its way—

I trust no Wise Man will condemn
A Cup of Genuine now and then.
When you are faint, your spirits low,
Your string relaxed ’twill bend your Bow,
Brace your Drumhead and make you tight,
Wind up your Watch and set you right:
But then again the too much use
Of all strong liquors is the abuse.
’Tis liquid makes the solid loose,
The Texture and whole frame Destroys,
But health lies in the Equipoise.

Resuming the north bank of the Frome, and the road to Tincleton, a left-hand turning is seen leading across to Piddletown, by way of Lower and Upper Bockhampton—hamlets rustic to the last degree, and, by reason of being quite remote from any road the casual stranger is likely to take, unknown to the outside world. Yet the second of these, the thatched and tree-embowered hamlet of Upper Bockhampton, has the keenest interest for the explorer of the Hardy Country, for it was here, in the rustic, thatched cottage still occupied by members of the Hardy family, that Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet, was born, June 2nd, 1840. It is a fitting spot for the birthplace of one who has described nature as surely it has never before been described, has pictured the moods of earth and sky, and has heard and given new significances to the voices of birds and trees, by the stubborn and intractable method of prose-writing.

Birthplace of Thomas Hardy

The cottage stands—its front almost hid from sight in the dense growths of its old garden and by the slope of the downs—at the extreme upper end of Upper Bockhampton, on the edge of the wild, called, with a fine freedom of choice, Bockhampton or Piddletown Heath, and Thorneycombe or Ilsington Woods. You enter its garden up steep, rustic steps, and find its low-ceiled rooms stone-flagged and criss-crossed with beams. At the back, its walls, with small latticed windows, look sheer upon a lane leading into the heart of the woodland; where, so little are strangers expected or desired that the tree-trunks bear notice-boards detailing what shall be done to those who trespass. Branches of these enshrining trees touch the thatched roof and scrape the walls, and the voices of the wind and of the woodlands reverberate from them; and when the sun goes down, the nocturnal orchestra of owls and nightingales strikes up. It is an ideal spot for the birth of one whose genius and bent are largely in the interpretation of nature; but it must not be forgotten that the chances are always against the observation and appreciation of scenes amidst which a child has been born and reared, and that only exceptional receptivity can throw off the usual effect of staleness and lack of interest in things usual and accustomed. It is thus in the nature of things that the townsman generally takes a keener interest in the country than those native to it, and the dweller in the mushroom cities of commerce finds more in a cathedral city than many of those living within the shadow of the Minster ever suspect. This is to say, parabolically, what we all know, that the nature of the seer is an exceptional nature, and rises superior to the dulling effects of use and wont: unaccountable as the winds that blow, and not to be analysed or predicated by any literary meteorological department.

Birthplace of Thomas Hardy

Returning through Lower Bockhampton, on the way to Tincleton, a ridge is presently seen on the left hand, crowned with fir-trees, and a little questing will reveal a rush-grown pool, the original of Heedless William’s Pond, mentioned in The Fiddler of the Reels. Beyond this landmark, a cottage that fills the position of “Bloom’s End” in The Return of the Native, is seen, and on the right-hand side the farmstead of Norris Mill Farm, where, overlooking the Vale of Great Dairies, is the original of Talbothays, the dairy where Angel Clare, learning the business from Dairyman Crick, met Tess. Below the grassy bluff on whose sides the farm-buildings stand may be traced the fertilising course of the Frome, or as Mr. Hardy calls it, the Var:—“The Var waters were clear as the pure River of Life shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with pebbly shadows that prattled to the sky all day long. There the water-flower was the lily.”

The “Duck” Inn, Original of the “Quiet Woman” Inn

This land of fat kine and water-meads, to the south of the road, is neighboured to the northward by the outlying brown and purple stretches of Egdon Heath, into whose wilds we shall presently come. “Bloom’s End,” or a house that may well stand for it, we have noticed, and now come upon a humble little farm on the right hand, standing with front to the road and facing upon a strikingly gloomy heather-covered hill. This is the house, once the “Duck” inn, which figures in The Return of the Native as the “Quiet Woman” inn, kept by Damon Wildeve, who, a failure as an engineer, made a worse shipwreck of life here. As described in the novel, a little patch of land has by dint of supreme exertions been reclaimed from the grudging soil:

“Wildeve’s Patch, as it was called, a plot of land redeemed from the heath, and after long and laborious years brought into cultivation. The man who had discovered that it could be tilled died of the labour: the man who succeeded him in possession ruined himself in fertilising it. Wildeve came like Amerigo Vespucci, and received the honours due to those who had gone before.”

A casual talk with the small farmer who has taken the place reveals the fact that this soil is a hard taskmaster and yields a poor recompense. The heathery hill facing it is described exactly as it is in nature:

“The front of the house was towards the heath and Rainbarrow, whose dark shape seemed to threaten it from the sky. . . .”

“It was a barrow. This bossy projection of earth above its natural level occupied the loftiest ground of the loneliest height that the heath contained. Although from the vale it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean brow, its actual bulk was great. It formed the pole and axis of this heathery world.”The soil at the back of the house is better, which indeed it could well be without being even then particularly good. It slopes towards the river, at what is described in the book as “Shadwater Weir,” where the drowned bodies of Wildeve and Eustacia were found:

“The garden was at the back, and behind this ran a still deep stream.”

Tincleton

The village of Tincleton, the “Stickleford” of casual mention in some of the short stories, is one of about a dozen cottages, clustering round a little church and school; and with presumably a few dozen more dwellings in the neighbourhood of the wide common on which Tincleton stands, to account for the existence of that school and that church. Past it and Pallington, whose hill and hilltop firs, known as Pallington Clump, are conspicuous for great distances, we turn to the left and explore a portion of Egdon Heath towards Bryan’s Piddle and Bere Regis. Everywhere the wilds now stretch forth and seem to bid defiance to the best efforts of the cultivator, but down at the hamlet of Hurst, where water is plentiful, there is an ancient red-brick farm of superior aspect, and yet with a thatched roof—an effect oddly like that which might be produced by a gentleman wearing a harvester’s hat. It is obviously an old manor-house, and besides showing evidences of former state, has two substantial brick entrance piers surmounted by what country folk, in their native satire, call “gentility balls.”

Such gentility in the neighbourhood of wild, uncanny Egdon wears, as Mr. Hardy would say, “an anomalous look.” The heath is more akin with Adam than with his descendants:

“This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday. Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary wilderness—‘Bruaria.’ Then follows the length and breadth in leagues; and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of this ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area of Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. ‘Turbaria Bruaria’—the right of cutting heath-turf—occurs in charters relating to the district. ‘Overgrown with heth and mosse,’ says Leland of the same dark sweep of country.”

“Here at least were intelligible facts regarding the landscape—far-reaching proofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untamable Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilisation was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation. In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in raiment of modern cut and colours has more or less an anomalous look. We seem to want the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of the earth is so primitive.”

Here, if anywhere in this poor old England of ours, generally over-populated and sorted over, raked about, and turned inside out, there is quiet and solitude. No recent manifestations of the way the world wags, no advertisement hoardings, no gasometers or mean suburbs intrude upon the inviolable heath. No one has yet suspected coal beneath the shaggy frieze coat of this remote vestige of an earlier age, and its vitals have therefore not been probed and dragged forth. A railway skirts it, ’tis true, but only on the way otherwhere, and no network of sidings has yet made a gridiron of its unexploited waste. Elsewhere trim hedges or fences of barbed-wire restrain the explorer, but here he is free to roam, and may so roam until he has fairly lost himself.

An Egdon Farmstead

It is a land wholly antithetic from the bubbling superficial feelings of cities, and has the introspective, self-communing air of the solitary. A town-bred man,

“Heart-halt and spirit-lame,
City-opprest,”

and wearied with the weariful reek of the streets, the jostling of the pavements, and the intolerable numbers of his kind, might come to a spell of recluse life in a farm on Egdon, and there rid him of that supersaturation of humanity; returning at last to his streets with a new spirit, a brisker step, and a revived hope in the right ordering of the world. So much Egdon can do for such an one.

A Farm on Egdon

I know just such a farm, in the dip of the yellow road, its thatched roofs and the near trees taking on a homely, comfortable look when night closes down upon the wild, when its windows are lit with a welcome ray as the sun goes down, in an angry glory in the west. This is, to me, the heart of the Hardy Country, and its surroundings seem most closely to fit his imaginings. The place has just that personality he gives his farmsteads, and the wastes near it wear sometimes just that cold indifference to humanity, and at others precisely that ogreish hostility, he in his pagan way describes.

Halting here, as the sun goes down, and the landscape changes from its daylight browns and purples to an irradiated orange, and through the siennas and umbers of an etching, to the blackness of night, I feel that here resides the genius loci, the Spirit of the Heath.