Published by Good Press, 2021

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      EAN 4057664607133

Table of Contents

       PREFACE

       CHAPTER I

       CHAPTER II

       CHAPTER III

       CHAPTER IV

       CHAPTER V

       CHAPTER VI

       CHAPTER VII

       CHAPTER VIII

       CHAPTER IX

       CHAPTER X

       CHAPTER XI

       CHAPTER XII

       CHAPTER XIII

       CHAPTER XIV

       CHAPTER XV

       CHAPTER XVI

       CHAPTER XVII

       CHAPTER XVIII

       CHAPTER XIX

       CHAPTER XX

       CHAPTER XXI

       CHAPTER XXII

       CHAPTER XXIII

       CHAPTER XXIV

       CHAPTER XXV

       CHAPTER XXVI

       CHAPTER XXVII

       CHAPTER XXVIII

       CHAPTER XXIX

       INDEX.

PREFACE

       Table of Contents

      Dorsetshire, the centre of the “Hardy Country,” the home of the Wessex Novels, is a land literally flowing with milk and honey: a land of great dairies, of flowers and bees, of rural industries, where rustic ways and speech and habits of thought live long, and the kindlier virtues are not forgotten in such stress of life as prevails in towns: a land desirable for its own sweet self, where you may see the beehives in cottage gardens and therefrom deduce that honey of which I have spoken, and where that flow of milk is no figure of speech. You may indeed hear the swish of it in the milking pails at almost every turn of every lane.

      Thatch survives in every village, as nowhere else, and here quaint towns maintain their quaintness at all odds, while elsewhere foolish folk seek to be—as they phrase it—“up to date.” It is good, you think, who explore these parts, to be out of date and reckless of all the tiresome worries of modernity.

      Spring is good in Dorset, summer better, autumn—when the kindly fruits of the earth are ingathered and the smell of pomace is sweet in the mellow air—best. Winter? Well, frankly, I don’t know.

      To all these natural advantages has been added in our generation the romantic interest of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s novels of rural life and character, in which real places are introduced with a lavish hand. The identity of those places is easily resolved; and, that feat performed, there is that compelling force in his genius which inevitably, sooner or later, magnetically draws those who have read, to see for themselves what manner of places and what folk they must be in real life, from whose characteristics such poignant tragedy, such suave and admirable comedy, have been evolved. I have many a time explored Egdon, and observed the justness of the novelist’s description of that sullen waste: have traversed Blackmoor Vale, where “the fields are never brown and the springs never dry,” but where the roads—it is a cyclist’s criticism—are always shockingly bad: in fine, have visited every literary landmark of the Wessex Novels. If I have not found the rustics so sprack-witted as they are in The Return of the Native and other stories—why, I never expected so to find them, for I did not imagine the novelist to be a reporter. But—this is in testimony to the essential likeness to life of his women—I know “Bathsheba”; only she is not a farmer, nor in “Do’set,” and I have met “Viviette” and “Fancy.” They were called by other names, ’tis true; but they were, and are, those distracting characters come to life.

      A word in conclusion. No attempt has here been made to solemnly “expound” the novelist. He, I take it, expounds himself. Nor has it been thought necessary to exclude places simply for the reason that they by some chance do not find mention in the novels. These pages are, in short, just an attempt to record impressions received of a peculiarly beautiful and stimulating literary country,