Томас Харди – Under the Greenwood Tree (страница 2)

In 1886 Hardy published The Mayor of Casterbridge. At a country fair, Henchard, Hardy’s tragic hero, auctions off his wife and daughter when he’s drunk. He spends most of his life repenting for this act and eventually becomes an upstanding citizen of Casterbridge. Throughout the novel, Hardy focuses on the importance of reputation and good character and demonstrates how the present is always haunted by the past and cannot be denied.

Hardy’s best-known novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, was published in 1891. Tess starts out as an innocent peasant girl, but embarks on a tragic tale that ends in her execution for murder. For Hardy, the story was an examination of how the individual can wind up in such desperate situations, even when their beginnings are much the same as others people’s. Like Eustacia, Tess is attractive and her ambitions lead her into scenarios that make her life ever more unsettled. The admission that people could be drawn by lust and desire to flout the rules of society came as a shock to the Victorian audience, but Hardy was also attempting to show what happens when rules are ignored. In essence, Tess is a victim of circumstance, but she is still allowed to make her own decisions. It is this interplay between the involuntary and voluntary that makes Tess’ story so tragic, and also explains why the book is regarded as a masterpiece of English prose.

Hardy’s Literary Legacy

In many respects the literature of Thomas Hardy is quintessentially English in tone and content. His stories are set in the deepest rural and bucolic southwest, where time attempts to stand still, preserving an English idyll that was worlds apart from the industrialization of the 19th century. For this reason his novels are described as belonging to the genre of ‘naturalism’.

Hardy was born and bred in Dorsetshire (now known simply as Dorset) and that is the epicentre of his constructed fictional world – one that is half imagined, half real, for he substitutes the actual names for places with alternatives conjured from his own mind. Hardy was primarily concerned with the innate nature of personalities in his literature. He ascribed each character with a personality type which largely predetermined their fate. While other authors, such as Charles Dickens, conveyed the idea that people can learn from their mistakes and change, Hardy showed the opposite. For Hardy, people never really learn the error of their ways and fate will deal them their hand in proportion to their level of selfishness, vanity, pride, foolishness, arrogance, unkindness or other failing. In some cases Hardy even resorts to having troublesome characters killed off or removed to prison in order to restore harmony. In this way he gives the more deserving the opportunity to alter their circumstances for the better.

One might think that Hardy was religious, given this moral and ethical filter, but he wasn’t particularly interested in religion. He was more taken by the idea of allowing his characters to express superstitions and supernatural beliefs. In this regard he was really adopting the view of the anthropologist, who remains necessarily impartial on matters of belief, so that they can study people with neutrality. His work is also filled with subtle allusions to Classical references, which he used to underpin central characters.

Hardy used to search for events reported in newspapers and often used them in his plots. It wasn’t so much that he lacked the imagination to think up ideas, but that he wanted to inject a sense of realism by introducing elements that simply would not have occurred to him. Real life can sometimes be stranger than fiction.

In Far From the Madding Crowd, published in serial form in 1874, Bathsheba is the beautiful female protagonist and it is through her experiences that Hardy exposes his feelings on romantic love and the inconsistency and destruction that can be caused by relationships. However, the central concern is Hardy’s preoccupation with the modernity and industrialisation of society. Many of his texts are set in rural locations and Hardy details the dialects, landscape and people of the English countryside to try and preserve that history and endangered way of life. Central to Hardy’s overall ambition was to show that living people are only ever custodians of the world for future generations. Dorset is filled with ancient sites of human activity and prehistoric evidence of a past without humanity. Hardy wanted to make it clear that we each have a window of opportunity in life to make our mark. That is why he had little time for people whom he considered to be fatuous or self interested, because he was acutely aware that it is the impression that we make on others and in their memories that counts the most, both during life and after death.

Apart from anything else, Hardy had an eye for the tragedy of life. He was a humanist, who cared about the underdog and expressed this by dealing with those who were more privileged in his prose. His own life was not entirely filled with happiness, as he became estranged from his first wife and was then deeply affected by her death. Many of his female characters have a dangerous beauty to them, suggesting that Hardy’s view of women was perhaps coloured by his own experience and that he felt men fall for the charm and allure of women, but end up beguiled and unhappy as the result of their infatuation.

CHAPTER 1

Mellstock Lane

To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality.

On a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man was passing up a lane towards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a plantation that whispered thus distinctively to his intelligence. All the evidences of his nature were those afforded by the spirit of his footsteps, which succeeded each other lightly and quickly, and by the liveliness of his voice as he sang in a rural cadence:

“With the rose and the lily

And the daffodowndilly,

The lads and the lasses a-sheep-shearing go.”

The lonely lane he was following connected one of the hamlets of Mellstock parish with Upper Mellstock and Lewgate, and to his eyes, casually glancing upward, the silver and black-stemmed birches with their characteristic tufts, the pale grey boughs of beech, the dark-creviced elm, all appeared now as black and flat outlines upon the sky, wherein the white stars twinkled so vehemently that their flickering seemed like the flapping of wings. Within the woody pass, at a level anything lower than the horizon, all was dark as the grave. The copse-wood forming the sides of the bower interlaced its branches so densely, even at this season of the year, that the draught from the north-east flew along the channel with scarcely an interruption from lateral breezes.

After passing the plantation and reaching Mellstock Cross the white surface of the lane revealed itself between the dark hedgerows like a ribbon jagged at the edges; the irregularity being caused by temporary accumulations of leaves extending from the ditch on either side.

The song (many times interrupted by flitting thoughts which took the place of several bars, and resumed at a point it would have reached had its continuity been unbroken) now received a more palpable check, in the shape of “Ho-i-i-i-i-i!” from the crossing lane to Lower Mellstock, on the right of the singer who had just emerged from the trees.

“Ho-i-i-i-i-i!” he answered, stopping and looking round, though with no idea of seeing anything more than imagination pictured.

“Is that thee, young Dick Dewy?” came from the darkness.

“Ay, sure, Michael Mail.”

“Then why not stop for fellow-craters—going to thy own father’s house too, as we be, and knowen us so well?”

Dick Dewy faced about and continued his tune in an under-whistle, implying that the business of his mouth could not be checked at a moment’s notice by the placid emotion of friendship.

Having come more into the open he could now be seen rising against the sky, his profile appearing on the light background like the portrait of a gentleman in black cardboard. It assumed the form of a low-crowned hat, an ordinary-shaped nose, an ordinary chin, an ordinary neck, and ordinary shoulders. What he consisted of further down was invisible from lack of sky low enough to picture him on.

Shuffling, halting, irregular footsteps of various kinds were now heard coming up the hill, and presently there emerged from the shade severally five men of different ages and gaits, all of them working villagers of the parish of Mellstock. They, too, had lost their rotundity with the daylight, and advanced against the sky in flat outlines, which suggested some processional design on Greek or Etruscan pottery. They represented the chief portion of Mellstock parish choir.