Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/99

The Soil (. . . 1850)

 

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:

They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading roots, whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves; elbowed old elms and ashes with great forks, in which stood pools of water that overflowed on rainy days, and ran down their stems in green cascades. On older trees still than these, huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as

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