Hardy and Q: an Investigation into the South-West Cultural Tradition II

I. The Short Stories and Elements of One Novel Based in the Folk Tradition and Illustrating Possible Survivals from an Earlier Age

1. What this section is about

This is a detailed study of two short stories by Hardy in the light of a south-west folklore tradition whose roots appear to lie in the prehistory of Dorset.

2. The Nature of Conscious Experience in Isolated and Traditional Dorset Communities

How far Thomas Hardy provides insight into the conscious experience of working people in Dorset villages and how far he adapted traditional material for the urban market is an important question.

There are two stories which possibly reveal the most primitive level of traditional community life, although they seem as outliers to the main body of Hardy's work. Firstly, 'The Withered Arm' from Wessex Tales of 1888. Secondly, 'The Superstitious Man's Story' from Life's Little Ironies and A Few Crusted Characters of 1894. These two stories are of remarkable interest when compared and contrasted with the short stories of Q. They are of even more interest when read in the light of Jonathan Couch's History of Polperro of 1871 (edited by Thomas Q. Couch), and A.K. Hamilton Jenkin's Cornwall and the Cornish, one of a trilogy, introduced by Q, and published in 1932-4.

Exactly where Q obtained his folk material from is not always obvious. His father, Dr Thomas Q. Couch, was a noted folklorist from Bodmin. Yet Q could have obtained some material from Abbotskerwell, in south-east Devon, where his Ford grandparents farmed.

How close a relationship there is between the folklore traditions of Dorset, Devon and Cornwall is unclear. In Popular Romances and Drolls of the West of England, (187), Robert Hunt draws a line of demarcation along the river Exe, with a zone of transition to the east. At the time of the Roman Empire, the area comprising Cornwall, Devon and western Somerset was the province of the Dumnonii, with their capital at Exeter. Dorset was occupied by the Durotrigues, with their capital at Dorchester.

Later Saxon influence was stronger to the east and weaker to the west, and probably stronger in the upper than in the lower levels of society. Isolated rural communities would have retained traditions long after they had ceased in the towns; and the towns were far and few. If we wish to look for an underlying continuity in the south-west peninsula, it is to the remote villages that we must go.

3. 'The Withered Arm' from Wessex Tales (1888)

Plot

Farmer Lodge of Holmstoke Farm has a son by the milkmaid Rhoda Brook, but marries a much younger woman, Gertrude of Anglebury. Rhoda has a dream of Gertrude sitting on her. She pulls her off by the arm. In real life, Gertrude's arm begins to wither. Unable to find relief from the doctors she repairs to Conjuror Trendle of Egdon Heath, who advises her to lay her hand on the neck of a hanged man. She arranges this with the hangman, only to find the man to be the son of Lodge and Brook – who accuse her of gloating. She dies soon afterwards. Lodge sells the farm, moves away and dies, leaving provision in his will for Rhoda, who refuses it.

Characters

1. Farmer Lodge of Holmstoke Farm is a yeoman in the prime of life. As a yeoman he owns the farm and can presumably vote and sit on juries. He has a son by Rhoda Brook who could have inherited the farm, but he marries a young woman from Anglebury called Gertrude. By her he has no children. Following the hanging of his son, he is estranged from Gertrude and temporarily reunited with Rhoda. However, he sells the farm, moves away and dies. In his will he remembers Rhoda, but she refuses any consideration.

2. Rhoda Brook is the milkmaid on Holmstoke Farm by whom Farmer Lodge has a son. She quickly loses her looks and is superseded in the affections of Lodge by Gertrude of Anglebury. By accident or intent she places a curse on Gertrude. The son is not to inherit the farm and commits a crime leading to his hanging in Casterbridge. This brings Brook and Lodge temporarily together, but shortly afterwards she leaves the village, only returning after Lodge has moved away. She is left a consideration in Lodge's will but for reasons unknown refuses it. How she provides for herself is not explained.

3. Gertrude of Anglebury, later Gertrude Lodge, is a very young woman who marries Farmer Lodge, but has no child by him. Her arm begins to wither and, finding no assistance from the local doctors she resorts to Conjuror Trendle, whose bizarre advice of touching a hanged man leads to an estrangement with her husband and her death shortly afterwards.

4. Conjuror Trendle, who lives in a remote valley of Egdon Heath, is a dealer in local products. He is regarded as a conjuror, but does not advertise his powers and appears not to gain financially from them. His first attempt to assist Gertrude is ineffective, while the second leads to her death.

5. Young Brook is the son of Farmer Lodge and Rhoda Brook. He is reared by his mother, but is not to inherit the farm from his father. He is hanged in Casterbridge for an unstated crime.

Locations

Holmstoke: This is possibly East Holme, with the chalk upland to the north, Dorchester to the west and Wareham to the east. East Holme is a village on the Dorchester to Wareham road, although closer to the latter; Wareham would then be Anglebury. The chalk uplands are Egdon Heath in the story and Dorchester is Casterbridge.

Dating

The story is based on a precise chronology which can be reconstructed.

Section IX: As the county jail bears the inscription 'COVNTY JAIL: 1793 and the work was published in 1888, the action takes place between these dates.

Section VI: Gertrude Lodge's second visit to Conjuror Trendle is twelve years after "13" or 1813, which is 1825. We are informed that in 1825 she had been married 'half-a-dozen years', dating the marriage to 1819.

Section VII: On the second journey to Trendle she is 'twenty-five'.

All other dates follow.

A Summary by Section

Section I: 'A Lorn Milkmaid', Friday in early April, 1819
Farmer Lodge of Holmstoke has a home farm and a second one rented out. One of the milkmaids is Rhoda Brook by whom he has had a son but who he never speaks to. She works apart from the other milkmaids because accredited with unusual powers. Rhoda is thirty, with fading looks.

Farmer Lodge, aged nearly forty, is returning to Holmstoke after marrying Gertrude, a nineteen year old woman from beyond Anglebury.

Rhoda Brook lives with her twelve year old son in a hovel below Egdon Heath. She asks her son to observe Gertrude's features and to inform her of them.

Section II: 'The Young Wife'
Lodge and his wife are observed on the road to Holmstoke by Rhoda's son. He is observed by Gertrude but ignored by Lodge.

The boy provides a description of Gertrude for Rhoda. Hardy emphasises the prosperity of the Lodges and the poverty of the Brooks.

Rhoda, who is not a churchgoer, tells her son to attend service to again observe Gertrude. This enables Rhoda to formulate a picture as in a 'photograph'.

Section III: 'A Vision', two to three weeks later. 
Before retiring Rhoda rakes out and observes the ashes in the grate – a form of divination, although Hardy does not say this.

At 2 a.m., having retired, Rhoda Brook has a 'vision' of Gertrude, a 'spectre', sitting on her as she lies in bed. Rhoda takes Gertrude's left arm in her right hand, burying her fingers into the flesh, so as to fling Gertrude onto the floor. We later learn that the son heard a crash at 2 a.m. and Gertrude felt the pain in her arm at exactly the same time.

Hardy presents this as vicarious circumstance or fate, rather than as Rhoda's desired wish. Such an interpretation lies outside of the folk tradition.

Between 11 a.m. and noon the following morning, Gertrude, who Rhoda recognises from the 'vision' arrives at the cottage with a pair of boots for the son. Rhoda repents of 'her curse' !?

About two weeks later Gertrude returns, showing Rhoda the finger marks on her arm as though formed from the grip in 'the vision'.

Rhoda Brook again feels 'guilty', wondering if she possesses a 'malignant power', especially as she was locally regarded as a 'witch'. She would certainly have known that any 'curse' has to be intentionally placed, making these reflections to no purpose.

Section IV: 'A Suggestion', Late summer
A 'fatality', or fate, results in the regular meeting of Rhoda and Gertrude, who explains the growing problem of her arm, which doctors are unable to heal, and which Lodge fears to be of a 'witch' or 'devil'.

Gertrude consults her friends who advise consulting someone from Egdon Heath, whose movements were best known to Rhoda! When Rhoda informs Gertrude of Conjuror Trendle Gertrude takes fright, but eventually asks Rhoda to take her, which Rhoda is not keen to do.

Section V: 'Conjuror Trendle', Late summer 1819
Although Rhoda Brook fears being exposed, she takes Gertrude Lodge to Conjuror Trendle, a dealer in heath products, who dismisses his own powers but looks knowingly at Rhoda.

He recognises the malady as being the product of ill-wishing and reveals the ill-wisher to Gertrude through a form of divination. It is almost certainly Rhoda who is revealed. Rhoda feels 'triumph' in that both women share the same malign influence, presumably the action of Farmer Lodge.

The farm workers regard Gertrude's malady as the result of being 'overlooked', with Rhoda rather than Lodge as the culprit. Rhoda and her son move away from Holmstoke.

Section VI: 'A Second Attempt', 1825
After six years the marriage is in dissolution. Gertrude, having tried many remedies, decides to consult Conjuror Trendle for a second time. Trendle discounts his influence, presumably regarding Rhoda as having greater power – traditionally women being seen as more powerful than men – but advises the well known folk remedy of touching the neck of a newly hanged man, although it is twelve years since it had been used.

There is evidence here of Trendle's awareness of changing attitudes following the end of the Napoleonic War.

Section VII: 'A Ride', 1826, Thursday to Saturday in July, 1826
At Casterbridge Assizes in July young Brook, aged 18, is to be hanged for rick-burning. Farmer Lodge and Rhoda Brook secretly attend the trial on Thursday.

Section VIII: 'A Water-side Summit', Friday
Gertrude rides to Casterbridge to arrange with the hangman for a viewing of the body.

Section IX: 'A Rencounter', Saturday
The hanging of Brook takes place at 12 noon. At one o'clock Gertrude and - unknown to her - Farmer Lodge and Rhoda Brook are admitted to the jail. Gertrude lays her arm on Brook's neck and is healed, but at that moment Lodge and Rhoda appear and accuse her of gloating. Gertrude collapses. Lodge and Rhoda convey the body away.

Gertrude dies three days later. Farmer Lodge disposes of his land, retires to Port Bredy  (Bridport) and dies two years later having bequeathed all his wealth to a reformatory for boys and with provision for Rhoda. But when she returns to Holmstoke she refuses Lodge's annuity and lives at Holmstoke into old age.

In Section Order

Section I
Day I, Friday, early April, 1819
1. Farmer Lodge and Gertrude Lodge arrive at Holmstoke after their marriage
2. Rhoda Brook, 30 – born approx. 1789
3. Farmer Lodge, near 40 – b.a. 1779-80
4. Son of Lodge and Brook, 12, b.a. 1807

Section II
Day 2, Saturday p.m., April
Day 3, Sunday a.m., April
1. Son of Rhoda goes to church to see Gertrude Lodge

Section III
Two to three weeks later, April/ May 1819 

Day 1, evening
1. Rhoda Brook rakes the ashes
Day 2, 2 a.m.
1. Rhoda Brook's 'vision', heard by son and experienced by Gertrude Lodge
2. Morning, 11 a.m. to 12 noon, Gertrude Lodge arrives at Rhoda Brook's cottage.
Thirteen days later:
1. Second visit of Gertrude Lodge to Rhoda Brook and the marks on the left arm revealed and dated to 2 a.m. on Day 2.

Section IV: July-August, 1819
Section V:Late Summer, 1819
1. First visit of Gertrude Lodge, accompanied by Rhoda Brook, to Conjuror Trendle
Summer to Winter
1. Rhoda Brook and son leave Holmstoke

Section VI: 1825
1. Six years later
2. Gertrude Lodge 25, married 6 years, 1819 to 1825
3. Second visit of Gertrude Lodge to Conjuror Trendle
4. Trendle had used the remedy in " '13", twelve years before – 1813

Section VII: 1825 to 1826
1. Gertrude Lodge 25 in 1825
2. Next Assize at Casterbridge March 1826
3. Assize attended, July, 1826
4. Thursday a.m., trial of Lodge's and Brook's son attended by parents
5. Friday p.m., Gertrude Lodge travels to Casterbridge to arrange entry to jail

Section VIII: July, 1826
1. Friday, Gertrude Lodge speaks to hangman
2. The son to be hanged 18 – b. 1808

Section IX
1. Inscription 'COVNTY JAIL: 1793'
2. Saturday 12 noon, hanging
1 p.m. Gertrude Lodge meets Farmer Lodge and Rhoda Brook beside the body
3. Tuesday, Gertrude Lodge dies
4. Farmer Lodge sells farm, moves to Port Bredy and dies approx. 2 years later – 1828 or 1829
5. Rhoda Brook returns to Holmstoke and lives into old age. Dies poss. 1850S or 60s

In Date Order

1779-80: Farmer Lodge born, Holmstoke
1789: Rhoda Brook born, Holmstoke
1793: Inscription on County Jail, Casterbridge
1800: Gertrude Lodge born beyond Anglebury
1807: Son to Farmer Lodge and Rhoda Brook born at Holmstoke
1813: Trendle advises the remedy of touching the neck of a hanged man
1819: Early April, Framer Lodge marries Gertrude
April/May, vision of Rhoda Brook – Day 1
Gertrude Lodge visits Rhoda Brook – Day 2
Gertrude Lodge visits Rhoda Brook – Day 15
Late summer, Gertrude Lodge & Rhoda Brook visit Conjuror Trendle
1819-20: Rhoda Brook and son leave Holmstoke
1825: Gertrude Lodge visits Trendle for the second time. The remedy of touching the neck of a hanged man advised
1826: Rhoda Brook's son arrested for rick burning 

• July, Assize at Casterbridge
• Thursday, Lodge and Rhoda Brook attend trial
• Son convicted and sentenced to hanging
• Friday, Gertrude Lodge travels to Casterbridge
• Saturday, son hanged in County Jail, Casterbridge at 12 noon
• Lodge, Rhoda Brook & Gertrude Lodge meet by the body in the County Jail
• Tuesday, Gertrude Lodge dies
• August/September, Framer Lodge disposes of his two farms

1828-9: Farmer Lodge dies at Port Bredy
? Rhoda Brook returns to Holmstoke
? Rhoda Brook dies in old age

'The Withered Arm' and the Folklore Tradition

According to the available evidence from the south-west peninsula, ill-wishing, cursing or over-looking was a deliberate and calculated act with a specific, intended result. Neither the act nor the consequences can be accidental or arbitrary (Hamilton Jenkin, p. 290). If Gertrude Lodge's withered arm was the result of Rhoda Brook's 'vision', it was intended by Brook and was not the product of an unassumed or impersonal occult power. The one who curses can remove the curse. Rhoda Brook could have removed any curse placed by herself on Gertrude Lodge.

The inference is that Conjuror Trendle seems to have known that Rhoda Brook had occult power greater than his own (V & VI). In the south-west folk tradition, women were regarded as more powerful than men. The curse of a woman cannot be lifted by a man in most circumstances. In section IV, it says that Rhoda Brook suspects the local working folk thinking of her as a sorceress, would know the whereabouts of an exorcist, but Trendle could not have been that person.

The story presents Gertrude Lodge and Rhoda Brook as victims of an occult power, a 'magnipotent will'. Rhoda Brook was a victim of Farmer Lodge's sexual irresponsibility. If Gertrude Lodge's withered arm was the consequence of Rhoda Brook's 'vision', the 'vision' was the product of a conscious intention on the part of Brook, not of an impersonal force.

'The Withered Arm' seems to be a folk story based on the raw supernaturalism of the 18th century which Hardy redacted for the late 19th century and his own literary purpose.

In the Macmillan Wessex Tales (1930) is a preface dated 'April 1896 – May 1912' which centres on two stories for which a factual basis is claimed: 'The Withered Arm' and 'The Distracted Preacher'.

The factual information underlying 'The Withered Arm' may possibly have come from a number of sources as detailed in the preface:

• i. Hardy had listened to tales told by a man who had once coveted the position of public hangman, presumably in Dorchester, using this for sections VIII and IX.
• ii. Either directly or through the above, Hardy had learned of a woman who had been taken in youth to a convict's corpse to have her 'blood turned', as with Gertrude Lodge. See sections VI and IX.
• iii. Hardy informs us of a 'Rhoda Brook' who had a vision as outlined in section III. He claims to have misremembered the incident, with an 'aged friend' correcting the time from 2 a.m. to a 'hot afternoon'. The 'fresh originality of living fact' had suffered from 'our imperfect memories' (Hardy, 1930, pp.v-vi).

In the study 'Mr George Moore', first published in The Speaker of 1894 and reprinted in Adventures in Criticism of 1896, Q took exception to the role of a negative providence or fate in Hardy's novels, with Tess of the D'Urbervilles particularly referred to. As will be investigated later in this work, Hardy read this criticism with extreme displeasure. Q's criticism continued in the printed lecture 'The Poetry of Thomas Hardy' in Studies in Literature I  (1918) and in 'The Earlier Novels of Thomas Hardy' in The Poet as Citizen (1934).

In 'Mr George Moore', Q dismisses the idea of Tess's curse 'lying on all Dorset women; nor on all Dorset women who have illegitimate children' (Quiller-Couch, 1896, p. 360-61). In  'The Withered Arm', the 'curse' lies on two Dorset women: Rhoda Brook who has an illegitimate son and Gertrude Lodge who is barren. This leads to the unresolved ambiguity which lies at the story's centre:  is Rhoda Brook an innocent and abused milkmaid or a witch who places a curse on Gertrude Lodge, the young wife of Farmer Lodge, the father of Rhoda's son?

If 'The Withered Arm' is the product of the folk tradition, as seems to be the case, Hardy appears to have redacted it and this is what gives rise to another ambiguity. The unredacted version is possibly the following:

A local yeoman has a child by one of his milkmaids but refuses to marry her or acknowledge the son. Eventually he marries a young and attractive woman upon whom the milkmaid places a curse. The local conjuror cannot remove the curse but proposes an old remedy which ends in the woman's death. Whether the jail scene was a part of the original story or was introduced by Hardy, possibly from an unrelated tale, to illustrate the nature of fate, is unclear.

Traditional stories about 'conjuring' in the South-West

The History of Polperro by Dr Jonathan Couch

Such practices as 'conjuring' were found in the Polperro area of south-east Cornwall until at least the middle of the 19th century. Couch includes a section on 'conjuring' in Chapter Seven, 'Old Usages'. The section describes two individuals, John Stevens, an astrologer, who was 'skilful as well as sincere in the exercise of his science', and Harry Warne who was a clever fraud.

John Stevens 'was a shoemaker, a man of solitary habits'  and 'if his good-will was obtained he would employ his art in foretelling the fate of his neighbours, expecting for his labour neither fee nor reward. He was said to have predicted many things accurately . . .'  (Couch, p.125). He died in 1849, about nine years after Hardy was born, and fourteen before Q. Thomas Q. Couch, Q's father, would have known him. As he died aged 92 years old, he must have been born about 1757, when such practices were probably more common.

Jonathan Couch, a devout Methodist, concludes: 'the worst effect of it on him was that it led him to exclude God and his providence from the world, and to substitute the stars and an unavoidable fate' (ibid., pp. 125-6).

The similarities between Stevens and the fictional Trendle are that they both:

• earn a living from humble occupations
• are uneducated but intelligent men
• are reticent in using their powers
• refuse to take payment
• only act for those they like
• tended to be solitaries

There are differences in that Stevens is a student of astrology, something not mentioned in relation to Trendle (although he might have been), and Stevens relies upon his own powers without expecting bizarre rituals to be performed.

Cornwall and its People, by A.K. Hamilton Jenkin

In Book Two, Chapter Four, 'Folklore and Superstitions' Hamilton Jenkin relates that well into the 19th century conjurors and witches were well known characters in Cornwall . Tamsin Blight of Helston was sufficiently famous to have had her portrait painted, probably by one of the Opie brothers.  

In Section Eight of 'Folklore and Superstition', he writes:

Although Tamsin Blight and her husband, a mine-engine driver, were among the most celebrated "pellars" of the county, they had many rivals, for in their day, almost every town and village boasted one of more practitioner of the magic art. In the neighbouring town of Camborne dwelt another "wise woman", who had achieved such renoun for effecting cures that people were often brought to her from places as far distant as the Lizard. It is said that when Doctor Montgomery, the leading specialist in Cornwall at that time, had pronounced a case hopeless, the sufferer would commonly be taken to see the white witch of Camborne, and not a few received health at her hands (Hamilton Jenkin, p. 293).

Dr E.C. Edwards in A History of West Cornwall Hospital, Penzance, informs us that between 1822 and 1908 there were three generations of Montgomery in Penzance. They oversaw the Penzance Public Dispensary develop into the West Cornwall Dispensary and Infirmary, and then into the West Cornwall Hospital, as it is today. Doctors Richard and John Q. Couch of Penzance would have known them well, and almost certainly would have known of Tamsin Blight and the 'wise woman' of Camborne.

For those who like to see such practices as purely innocent and witches as old women persecuted by their neighbours, Hamilton Jenkin has a word of caution:

In former times the advice given by conjurors and witches not infrequently led to the perpetration of horrible cruelties... it was generally believed that it was within the power of one human being to bring evil upon another by a definite act of will (ibid., pp. 288 & 290).

Popular Romances of the West of England, by Robert Hunt (1865)

In the Section 'The Hand of a Suicide', Hunt provides provides some insight into Gertrude Lodge's wish to have her withered arm touched by the hand of a hanged man, as instructed by Conjuror Trendle:

This is only a modified form of the superstition that a wen, or any strumous swelling, can be cured by touching it with the dead hand of a man who has just been publicly hanged (Hunt, p. 378-9).

Hunt goes on to relate how he once saw a young woman taken to a scaffold at the Old Bailey to have a wen touched by a recently hanged man.

Either Dorset had its own version of the superstition or Hardy was adapting the above for the purpose of the plot.

4. 'The Superstitious Man's Story' from 'A Few Crusted Characters' in Life's Little Ironies 

Introduction

The title suggests a story told by a superstitious man. However, the man simply relates a number of incidents told to him by three different individuals (the wife, Nancy Wheedle, John Chiles) who recount what they have observed. Whether the man is superstitious is irrelevant. Hardy seems sensitive to the accusation of being himself superstitious, so casts the mantle on the original narrator.

Hunt identifies a folklore boundary along the River Exe; Hardy's story suggests that at a deeper level no real boundary existed. There are symbols and beliefs in 'The Superstitious Man's Story'which reappear west of the Tamar, although possibly in a slightly different form. Hardy might have encountered elements at St Juliot.

Unlike 'The Withered Arm' it is not a composite tale. Rather, it holds together as a single narrative in three parts, giving only what is important, spare and to the point, which is a feature of folk stories. This suggests that the narrative came to Hardy much as it stands in the text, representing the authentic experience of a traditional Dorset community.

Plot

1. On Old Midsummer Eve, Mrs Privett of Longpuddle observes William leaving the house when he is asleep upstairs.

2. Before midnight Nancy Weedle and girls observe William Privett, who had not left his bedroom, entering but not leaving the church.

3. Next day Nancy Weedle informs Mrs Privett.

4. Three days later William Privett and friend stop for a rest while mowing. The friend observes a moth apparently flying out of William's mouth. William is subsequently found to be dead.

5. Shortly afterwards, but still on day three, Philip Hookhorn observes William Privett visiting Longpuddle spring, the scene of his son's drowning, when, presumably he is in his coffin awaiting burial.

Date and location 

Date: Georgian-Victorian

Locality: Upper and Lower Longpuddle: possibly Puddlehinton and Piddletrenthide.

Longpuddle consist of two villages between Egdon Heath and Blackmore Vale which can be accessed from Casterbridge (Dorchester), through West Mellstock along a by-road. Hardy would have known the villages from his childhood.

Basis of the story

A folk tradition that on the night of 'Old Midsummer Eve' images of those destined to be seriously ill during the following year enter Longpuddle church, with only those destined to recover returning.

'Old Midsummer Eve' looks back to the Julian Calendar which was in force from Roman Times until 1752, when England and Wales adopted the Gregorian Calendar. The practice described must pre-date the Gregorian.

The superstition is based on a notion of determinism, where health or death are preordained. Interestingly, observation of the phenomenon is a case of an effect preceding the cause.

Jonathan Couch and Robert Hunt

There are forms of divination associated with Midsummer Eve in Jonathan Couch's History of Polperro, but these relate to seeing a husband-to-be.

In Hunt's Popular Romances and Drolls of the West of England, specifically the peninsula west of the river Exe, there is evidence of the belief found in Hardy's story. However, it is associated with the Gregorian not the Julian Calendar. this suggests Hardy's tradition to be the older or more conservative.

Under Midsummer Superstitious Customs, Hunt writes:

If a young unmarried woman stands on Midsummer-eve in the porch of the parish church, she will see, passing by in procession, everyone who will die in the parish during the year. This is so serious an affair that it is not, I believe, often tried. I have, however, heard of young women who have made the experiment. But everyone of the stories relate that, coming last in the procession, they have seen shadows of themselves; that from that day forward they have pined, and ere midsummer has again come round, that they have been laid to rest in the village graveyard (Hunt, p. 385).
 

Hardy and Hunt Compared

Q's Short Story 'Psyche' from Noughts and Crosses

Superstitions relating to the moth or butterfly provide the basis of 'Psyche'. It is about an engine-driver who believes his wife's soul haunts him in the form of a white butterfly or moth. The superstition that spirits take this shape is not unknown in the west.

His wife has died in a fire. When he sees a 'large white moth' being consumed in the flame of an altar candle, with 'the form that clothed his wife's soul shrivelled in unthinking flames', the engine-driver 'saw nothing but cruelty in the Providence of which the preacher spoke. . .' A conclusion with which Hardy would have had sympathy.

In 'The Superstitious Man's Story' William Privett and John Chiles were mowing in Mr Hardcome's meadow. After lunch they fall asleep. John Chiles wakes to see a 'miller-moth' or a 'white miller's-soul as we call 'em' issuing from the open mouth of a dead William Privett, William had once worked at a mill.

As in 'Psyche' there is a relationship between the moth, the soul and death, with the soul escaping the body in the form of a moth immediately after death.

Examples of the Phenomena from Other Sources

Hardy's folktale 'The Superstitious Man's Story' is unusual in that William Privett is seen by Nancy Weedle while he ia still alive and after his death by Philip Hookhorn.  

Dr Jonathan Couch was aware of individuals on the point of drowning revealing themselves to a close relative on shore. As Bertha Couch relates in her Life of Jonathan Couch, F.L.S. :

There is a belief among seafaring people that during the process of drowning, or just as the spirit is leaving the body, it appears to those nearest and dearest. . . Mr Couch himself noted down: "The following have been communicated to me as facts by very intelligent and respectable people. I entertain no doubts on the subject of the truth of these things; but why, and how these things are, I meddle not with" (Couch, B., pp. 89-90).

The Quillers were particularly prone to such phenomena as Bertha Couch relates in various places in the biography.

The Irish playwright J. M. Synge wrote Riders to the Sea on a similar basis after staying on the Aran Islands.

Before he went out on the sea that day his dog came up and sat beside him on the rocks and started crying. When the horses were coming down to the slip an old woman saw her son, that was drowned a while ago, riding on one of them. She didn't say what she was after seeing, and this man caught the horse, he caught his own horse first, and then he caught this one, and after that he went out and was drowned (Synge, p.35).

CATHLEEN speaking softly - You did not, mother, it wasn't Michael you seen, for his body is after being found in the far north, and he's got a clean burial, by the grace of God.

MAURYA a little defiantly - I'm after seeing him this day, and he riding and galloping. Bartley came first on the red mare, and I tried to say "God speed you", but something choked the words in my throat. He went by quickly; and "The blessing of God on you," says he, and I could say nothing. I looked up then, and I crying, at the grey pony, and there was Michael upon it – with fine clothes on him, and new shoes on his feet (ibid, pp 103).

A.K. Hamilton Jenkin in Cornwall and The Cornish relates a number of similar incidents. On one occasion a young lady was engaged to be married to a sailor when her mother received a letter announcing his death. She went upstairs to convey the information only to be greeted by the information:

"I know what you've come to say. My dear has been here already, and told me for himself. He was half-dressed, in his shirt and trousers, with one bracer only over his shoulder. One of his feet was bare, and on the other his boot was unlaced." Subsequent enquiry revealed the fact that this description exactly tallied with the appearance of the body, when it was recovered from the sea (Hamilton Jenkin, p. 266).

Hamilton Jenkin was told by a Charles Hoare of Madron that such experiences 'are based on facts and related by those who could have had no possible desire of seeing the apparition which they describe (ibid., p. 266). A similar account is given by Dr Jonathan Couch and recorded by Bertha Couch in her Life of Jonathan Couch, (p. 89). The detail of these appearances suggest that they are not shadows or vague impressions, nor can it be held that they came to individuals who believed in such things.

In A Short History of World War One, Norman Stone uses the classic memoir of the war, Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That  to describe the soldier's experience of the battle of Loos in September 1915 (Stone, p. 77). Graves' work also contains the following:

At Bethune , I saw the ghost of a man named Private Challoner . . . In June he passed by our "C" Company billet . . . Private Challoner looked in at the window, saluted, and passed on. I could not mistake him, or the cap-badge he wore; yet no Royal Welch battalion was billeted within miles of Bethune at the time. I jumped up, looked out of the window, and saw nothing except for a fag-end smoking on the pavement. Challoner had been killed at Festubert in May (Graves, p. 106).

Observation of the Royal Welch cap-badge is the detail Graves found compelling. 

Even A.L. Rowse, Q's biographer and rationalist, could not totally escape the phenomena, as he relates in A Cornish Childhood:

During the weeks Cheelie (Edwin Rowse) was at home, he was for ever fiddling with an old worn-out clock that had stopped working, yet hung in the kitchen over the table. One morning about eight o'clock, some months after he had gone away, while mother and father were sitting at breakfast, the clock suddenly struck "one" out loud. "That's funny", said my father "there must be a mouse in 'n." He got up and looked; there was no mouse there. Three weeks later they got the news that Cheelie had been killed on that day, about that time. They ever afterwards took it as a "token", a signal of his death: there were many such stories in Cornish families (Rowse, p. 38).

The death of Edwin Rowse took place in a mine on the Rand in South Africa.

Nor could Hardy escape the phenomena. As Seymour-Smith explains, Hardy had his own premonition of death. On October 27, 1927, he saw a 'dark man', some one he had seen some years before and which he interpreted as death. 'This afternoon he said: " I can see his face now" ' (Seymour-Smith, p. 862). Thus it proved.

This phenomenon is not restricted to the western seaboard of the British Isles. Alexandra David-Neel provides information from Tibet, where it is interpreted in terms of Tibetan culture. For instance, someone who has died in an unconscious state – sleep, faint, etc. – For several days will "talk" to people living in his former dwelling place and he will be astonished that no one answers him or seems to be aware of his presence' (p. 32-3). This appears to be what is happening when William Privett is seen by Philip Hookhorn by Longpuddle spring.

An equally remarkable parallel can be found in the religion of ancient Egypt. Ninian Smart says in The World's Religions:

In Egyptian thought there were in effect two souls. One is the "ba", which is depicted hieroglyphically as a little bird that flutters up to the sky at death; the other is the "akh" or spirit which survives in the afterlife (Smart, p. 201).

What is depicted in Egyptian thought as a bird is in Dorset folklore depicted as a butterfly. 

The phenomenon, however it is understood, seems a commonplace throughout Eurasia, suggesting an awareness which Q possibly explains through Dr Carfax, in Castle Dor, as a 'sixth sense in nature' (Quiller-Couch & Du Maurier, p.44). It is not supernatural, paranormal or esoteric, but completely natural. The sensible response is to acknowledge and leave well alone for it lies in the area of the irrational.

Q had no time for psychical research, any more than for Marxism, Fascism and scientific theories based on chance, randomness and conflict. He believed the universe to be a harmony, a harmony reflected in the human soul and of which reason was the product. What lay outside was of no value.

5. The Woodlanders

In The Woodlanders, Hardy reveals another Midsummer's Eve practice from Dorset, one which finds parallels in the writings of Robert Hunt and Jonathan Couch. The purpose of this practice is to raise the form or phantasm of the man a maiden will probably marry through the medium of sowing hemp seeds. Hunt seems to have a more detailed knowledge of the practice than Hardy. In The Woodlanders the practice needs to be fully understood if the full irony of the event is to be grasped.

Hardy includes a second practice which is less relevant to the plot.

Summary

On old Midsummer eve, Dr Edred Fitzpiers is standing by the garden gate of his lodgings when he sees a group of village girls walking to the nearby wood to sow hemp seed. His landlady disapproves of the practice as 'ungodly' (Hardy, 1982, p.194), but many villagers follow to observe. One is Grace Melbury, who loves Giles Winterborne but is fascinated by Edred Fitzpiers.

At this point a second practice is described, the digging of a hole in the ground on Old Midsummer's Day 'at twelve, and hearing our husband's trades' (ibid., p.195).

The first involves the 'sowing of hemp seed' with an 'incantation . . .to try to raise their forms' (ibid., p. 195) at midnight.

Fitzpiers and Winterborne wait behind a bush for the return of Grace. Great Hintock clock strikes twelve. The girls see the figure of a stranger, which they mistake for 'satan', and flee. Grace ends up temporarily in the arms of Fitzpiers whom she later marries. The irony is that she did indeed see her future husband, but not in the way she expected, and with the death of Winterborne, the man she really loved, as the unfortunate consequence.

Robert Hunt relates in his section on 'Midsummer Superstitious Customs': 

The practice of sowing hemp-seed on midsummer eve is not especially a Cornish superstition, yet it was at one time  favourite practice with young women to try the experiment. Many a strange story have I been told as to the results of the sowing, and many a trick...by young men...

There is a rude rhyme used on the occasion.

Hemp-see I sow,
Hemp-seed I hoe,

(the action of sowing the seed and hoeing it in, must be deliberately gone through);

And he
Who will my true love be
Come after me and mow.

A phantom of the true lover will now appear, and of course the maid or maidens retire in wild affright (Hunt, p. 384).

6. Reflections

In the two short stories 'The Withered Arm' and 'The Superstitious Man's Story', we seem to have two small windows, the second more transparent than the first, into the actual experience of the working class community in rural Dorset after the close of the Napoleonic War. As Hardy was born in 1840 and did not begin writing until the 1860s, when change must have been happening, he was looking backwards to the days of his parents and grandparents. One suspects that watching by the church porch no longer happened in 1860 and possibly not in 1840, although recourse to conjurors, at least when doctors failed, still happened, although surreptitiously.

Fear of ridicule was driving folk tradition underground, and to the isolated margins of society. Whether Hardy had direct access to it is a question this writer cannot answer. It is instructive that for a long time Jonathan Couch had no knowledge of John Stevens as an astrologer, but only as a shoemaker, although some of his patients must have availed themselves of his services.

In Cornwall, Hunt and Hamilton Jenkin identify Methodism as the cause of this decline of conjuring, witchcraft, astrology and folklore. In 'The Coming of Wesley', Hamilton Jenkin describes how John and Charles Wesley rode into a Cornwall of 'unashamed materialism', when Anglicanism was at its lowest ebb. Even during his last preaching tours, when he drew vast crowds, bigger ones attended the Midsummer bonfires, and the likes of Tamsin Blight would perambulate the countryside so that even the infirm could 'have their protections renewed (Hamilton Jenkin, p. 291).

It was Methodism, despised by the clergy and squirearchy, which challenged the power of superstition, fortune-telling and the ill-wish, causing a radical change in society. Jonathan Couch was at the centre of Methodism in the Polperro area. His testimony is important in that behind it lay his training in empirical science. By the time Q was writing only the embers remained, some may still be warm today, and he had to rely largely on the testimony of elderly people for authentic information.

The religious situation in Cornwall and west Devon was different from that in east Devon and Dorset, as the 'Census of Religious Worship, 1851' shows. In Cornwall the Wesleys had walked into something of a religious void. In Dorset, that void had long been filled by the dissenting bodies which looked back to the Continental reformed tradition, especially Calvinism. 'Old Dissent', with its centre in Dorchester, was even more opposed than Methodism to anything lying outside of Scripture. In Dorset the percentage share attending Non-Anglican Denominations was 37.8 and Wiltshire 47.8. This is scarcely reflected in the novels of Hardy.

In Section One of 'Folk-lore and Superstition', Hamilton Jenkin speaks of the 'stubborn rock of old belief' (ibid., p. 255). In Q's novella Ia, 80 year old Aunt Alse 'meditated spells older than the Caesars' (Quiller-Couch,1895, p. 168). This gives the impression of a folk culture of great antiquity. However, the witch spells that have come down to us contain garbled Church Latin, not Cornish, suggesting a provenance no older than the Reformation – when the language and much of the Celtic culture was lost.

It appears that at the Reformation, those aspects of Roman Catholicism associated with transubstantiation, visions and healings by holy persons or through sacred relics were disowned by the Anglican authorities, only to be taken over in an increasingly secular society by conjurors, witches and astrologers, some frauds and some with a certain natural gift.

A remarkable window into Medieval parish life, especially those parishes preserving the relics of an early 'saint', many more in Cornwall than in Dorset, was recently thrown open when some relics of St Bernadette of Lourdes arrived in England and Wales.

On the 9th and 10th of September 2022, the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Plymouth, the focal point for the diocese of Dorset, Devon and Cornwall, hosted the relics of St Bernadette of Lourdes. Bernadette Soubirous was a shepherdess in the Pyrenees who on sixteen occasions between 11th February and 16th July 1858 encountered a 'young woman' later 'confirmed' as being a vision of Mary the mother of Jesus (Catholic South-West, p. 4).

Thomas Hardy was about 18 years old and Dr Jonathan Couch 69 years old in 1858. In her Life of Jonathan Couch, Bertha Couch relates how following the death of his first wife Jonathan 'saw her standing by the bedside looking more radiant than ever I had seen her in life' (Couch, B., p. 28).

It may encourage some, amuse others and disconcert others again to think that President Joe Biden is a devout Catholic, while Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is a devout Hindu for whom such occasions as the above are a commonplace.

An important line between secular and sacred phenomena, is that secular phenomena have to be accepted by the folk community, while sacred phenomena have to be accepted by the Catholic Church following an investigation by those specifically appointed. Such acceptance is rare. The visions of Bernadette Soubirous were initially treated with scepticism by local clergy. The Church does not deny the possibility of secular phenomena, but see it as lying in a realm outside of divine providence, very much the position taken by Jonathan Couch, and therefore to be rejected.

The Christianization of south-western Britain in the early medieval period, either through the Celtic Church of the west or the mission of St Augustine of Canterbury in 597 from the east, appears to have been effective against overt pagan practice, yet those levels of consciousness laid down by the 'tribes beyond time' cannot have been easily drained of influence.

In The World's Religions, Ninian Smart has a section on the Ajivikas school of Hinduism which flourished on the Indian subcontinent for nearly a thousand years. He says:

The Ajikiva teachings centred on the idea of 'niyati' or fate. No virtuous act or austerity can help an individual to be released from the sufferings of this world . . .There is, then, nothing that an individual can do to alter his destiny or fate (Smart, p. 71).

Transferred to a secular context this accords with Hardy's views. The Ajikiva teaching is an attempt to explain human suffering. The idea of an inevitable fate, which no virtuous act can influence, is found in folklore and can be seen in both 'The Withered Arm'and 'The Superstitious Man's Story'.

In 'The Malignant God', Chapter 28 of Hardy, Seymour-Smith endeavours to understand Hardy's beliefs at a deeper level than contemporary thought by reflecting upon 'gnosticism'. Maybe a study of folklore would have shown the vehicle connecting Hardy's thought with the past, but Seymour-Smith does not investigate this.

Both Q and Hardy were reared as Anglicans. Q remained one while Hardy drifted into a different belief system. Significantly, Hardy may have read Darwin and Huxley, but there is no evidence of his having read Newman. Seymour-Smith does not mention Bunyan, John Donne, George Herbert or Henry Vaughan; nor even Dante. Q knew them all and knew them well. Was Hardy's Anglicanism ever more than superficial? Seymour-Smith states that F.R. Leavis regarded Hardy's cosmology as 'poor stuff'. He tries to defend Hardy, but Q was of the same opinion as Leavis, as will be discussed further.

II. The Folklore Tradition Reflected in a Selection of Hardy's Verse

1. What this section is about

This is a study of a selection of Hardy's verse which best reveals the importance to Hardy of a Dorset folk tradition, one related to a wider south-western folk tradition. The reader is invited to read it alongside the work of Cunliffe and Darvill.

2. Analysis of the Poems of Thomas Hardy.

Some of the material found in Hardy's novels and short stories has been seen by commentators as simply superstitions, traditional beliefs and folk tales. By their nature they are no more than vehicles for the development of the plot, which our sophisticated age can quickly pass over. Hardy is an observer rather than a participant, at best a recorder of traditional relics.

When we turn from the novels to the poems, and Q saw Hardy as by nature a poet, it comes as an inconvenience to see similar material at play, and a considerable amount of it. Hardy's creative imagination seems steeped in superstitious beliefs and phenomena. Even worse, much of this can be seen to stem from pre-history and the 'tribes beyond history', as a comparison with the writings of Darvill shows (see Part I).

Yet this should not surprise us if we take seriously Hardy's reply to the rationalist Hooper in Seymour-Smith's biography (p. 621), where Hardy places himself in a no-man's-land between the rational and the irrational. However, Hardy's reply leaves us not a little baffled, as if he said he lay between cause and effect.

Hardy gives the impression of being a rational human being in his everyday affairs. His writings are rationally constructed, his grammar is correct and his style much admired. Some possibly considered him a little eccentric but no-one considered him insane. How can his statement to Hooper be understood?

Q came from a different but not altogether dissimilar culture to that of Hardy, one peculiar to the western seaboard of the British Isles. He was fully aware of the type of beliefs and phenomena found in Hardy's writings, eventually forming a reasonably close relationship with the Dorset man. Q was the product of a Couch family tradition which acknowledged five senses and a 'sixth sense in nature'. This 'sixth sense' can be seen to occupy a space between the rational and the irrational. In his Quiller forebears this 'sixth sense' was evident to an extraordinary degree.

This 'sixth sense in nature' is not supernatural or contranatural, but completely natural. It is little found in those who are intent upon only developing the intellect, as in universities, who then deny its existence. Hardy possessed this faculty, as his poetry shows. Seymour-Smith informs us of two occasions when Hardy had a premonition of his death in the form of a 'dark man', the last time on October 27, 1927. There are a number of poems relating to death and premonitions of death.

In Moments of Vision, published in 1917, is the poem 'Signs and Tokens'. Numbered 479 in The Complete Poems, it contains a list of death signs related by three old women, one in a red cloak. In the Life of Jonathan Couch by Bertha Couch, there is a recollection of women wearing 'scarlet cloaks' (p. 18) at the time of Napoleon's threatened invasion in 1805. The material found in the poem can be dated to that time but looks back to the eighteenth century. There are four witches or conjurors in the work, the fourth of which has a face as 'cold' as the 'north', and seems to be senior. This is probably the north side of the church for Hunt explains a prejudice against burials to the north. The words 'head-room' almost certainly refer to a grave (Hunt, p. 379).

The collection Moments of Vision contains a group of poems extending the theme of 'Signs and Tokens'. The next is 'Path of Former Time' (480), which is simply nostalgia, but is followed by 'The Clock of the Years' (481) which is about calling up spirits – with unfortunate consequences. 'At the Piano' (482) is about an 'apparition', as is 'The Shadow on the Stone' (483), with its 'Druid stone' looking back to the 'Ancient Briton' of 'The Moth-Signal' (324).

There are two earlier poems, the first of which, 'The Glimpse' (448), is of a house haunted by a red-haired young woman. The second, 'Who's in the Next Room?' (450), is possibly a premonition of approaching death.

The short story 'The Superstitious Man's Story', analysed earlier, is of interest in that it contains material later included in a number of poems, including 'The Moth-Signal' (324). In that story, the soul of William Privett of Longpuddle in Dorset is released through the mouth in the form of a moth. That the soul takes the form of a moth or butterfly is also found in Q's short story 'Psyche'. It occurs in 'The Moth-Signal' (324) from Satires and Circumstances of 1914 and 'Something Trapped' (326) from Moments of Vision of 1917.

In 'The Moth-Signal', a moth flutters into the room of a disunited couple to be burned up in the flame of a candle. The same happens in 'Psyche', where a moth is burned in an altar candle. In 'The Moth-Signal', the moth is a token or a dual soul of an 'Ancient Briton' from a tumulus on Egdon Heath. As in Wuthering Heights by the Cornu-Irish Emily Brontë, the woman is enamoured of a spiritual being. In Wuthering Heights Heathcliff is enamoured of the wraith of Cathy.

In 'Something Trapped', a woman is waiting for her 'beloved' and hears a tap on the window and sees his face. On nearing the glass she sees only a moth. The 'beloved', for whom she has waited so long is dead. The tragedy of the poem depends upon a knowledge of the moth symbol.

In 'The Superstitious Man's Story', William Privett is seen by a stream where his son was drowned even though he is dead. The relationship between water, 'men's souls' and apparitions is found in the poem 'Vagg Hollow' (610) from Late Lyrics (1922). A footnote states that this is an area of marsh near Ilchester where apparitions regularly appear. A waggoner's assistant hears the call of his dead father in the wind. This seems to take us back to Darvill's understanding of the pre-historic 'Underworld' as a place of waters.

The same relationship, and one even closer to Cathy and Heathcliffe, is found in 'On Martock Moor' (797). A woman contrasts a loveless marriage with a wealthy man from whom she cannot free herself, with a passion for a poor man who is now dead. Once she met him alive by a weir, but now she can only meet his 'phantom' by the waters.

This phenomenon is also found in 'At Rushy-Pond' (680), where there is a union with the 'wraith' of one once loved as the moon-shine on a pond's surface. This is spiritual rather than sensual love.

The fictional village of Longpuddle and Midsummer Eve, the latter celebrated in Cornwall by bonfires, play a significant role in Hardy's verse. In Human Shows of 1925 there is the poem 'The Sexton at Longpuddle' (745). This is followed by 'She Saw Him, She Said' (752), where a woman sees her husband talking to the sexton by the church door. On returning home she discovers that he has not left the house, where he has been watching the moon and listening to the tolling of the church bell. There had been no tolling that evening. The implication is for the tolling to relate to his death in the coming year; with Midsummer Eve as the implied but not stated date of the incident. It is also implied that the incident had been related to Hardy either by the woman or someone in the know. Hunt informs us that in Cornwall seeing a new moon for the first time through glass is considered unlucky (p. 429).

In Moments of Vision of 1917, there is the poem 'On a Midsummer Eve' (372) which relates parsley, water, the moon and the vision of a woman now dead. This is yet another belief about Midsummer Eve.

In 'The Tree and the Lady' (485), Hardy envisions himself as the spirit of the tree, looking back to a time when physical objects in nature were said to possess a spiritual counterpart. In 'An Upbraiding' (486), he is one of the dead who haunts one of the living. There is an ambiguity in this and other poems, with 'The Man Who Forgot'(490) as one of the most obscure. However, to employ a rationalistic interpretation is to diffuse the dramatic tension and to change Hardy's creative world into another and alien one.

Reading Hardy with a respect for local culture is also necessary to any understanding of 'The Sailor's Mother' (625) from Late Lyrics of 1922. The mother realises from the phenomenon that her sailor son has just died at sea and is beside herself with grief. Dr Jonathan Couch came across many similar incidents in Polperro, a fishing community.

Midsummer is not the only date on the calendar relevant to Hardy's verse. There are two poems based on All Soul's Day, the pagan festival of Samhain or Samain, which ran from the first to the sixth of November and celebrated the beginning of winter. It was the pagan festival of the dead, when the barrier between the natural and the supernatural worlds was removed. The spiritual realm became visible, with intercourse between the living and the dead. It began the Celtic year although its roots probably lay in pre-Celtic times.

'I Rose Up As My Custom Is' (311) from Satires of Circumstance of 1914 clearly looks back to Samhain, with the rising enacted each year, as the spirit world interacting with the human. Hardy is the spirit rising from the grave on All Soul's Day. In 'A Night of Questioning' (696) from Human Shows of 1925, it is the poet who is being questioned at midnight on All Soul's Eve by spirits rising.

A belief relating to Christmas Eve, that oxen kneel in their stalls at midnight, lies behind the poem 'The Oxen' from Moments of Vision of 1917. Of this Hunt says: 'I remember when a child, being told that all the oxen and cows kept at a farm in the parish of St Germans, at which I was visiting with my aunt, would be found on their knees when the clock struck twelve (on Christmas Eve). This is the only case within my knowledge of this widespread superstition existing in Cornwall' (ibid., p. 389). Apparently, it was common over the river in Devon and as far east as Dorset.

Thomas Hardy was the product of a native culture, one of great antiquity. This culture underlies his novels, poems and short stories. The Scottish novels of Walter Scott are similarly underlain, as are the works of Q and Synge. Although we talk of a multi-cultural society, native cultures have been all but extinguished in the British Isles. Hardy may have adapted his writings to suit the market, but his creative dynamic remained rooted in the soil of Dorset. It is surely respectful to see his works in his own terms before imposing another. The above is a very brief attempt to do just that.

The ageless importance of Christmas Eve, traditionally the shortest day of the old pagan calendar, is illustrated in 'Yuletide in a Younger World' (841). Stanza one laments the loss of revelry that Hardy could remember, what in Cornwall was called 'guise dancing' as Q describes it in I Saw Three Ships. In stanza two, there is a description of how dead villagers crossed the bridges and stiles they had formerly used when in the body. Stanza three relates to divination. Stanza four is difficult to interpret as the terms are opaque. What is significant is the claim that these phenomena were experienced in the 1840s but not in the 1920s, as though there had been a coarsening of the human spirit.

III. Q's published writings on Thomas Hardy

1. What this section is about

This is a study of Hardy and Q looking at all lectures and references to Hardy in Q's printed works. It covers a 38 year period from Adventures in Criticism of 1896 to The Poet as Citizen of 1934.

2. References to Thomas Hardy in the Writings of Q from 1891 to 1934

I. From The Speaker as published in Adventures in Criticism,1896:
'A Baconian Essay', December 1891
'Extends', August 1894
'Mr Anthony Hope', October 1894
'Bjornstjerne Bjornson', June 1895
'Mr George Moore', March 1894

II. Studies in Literature (I), 1918
Brief reference: 'On the Terms "Classical" and "Romantic"'
'The Poetry of Thomas Hardy': a study of Hardy's published collections up to 1918

III. Studies in Literature (II), 1922
No studies or references to Hardy

IV. Studies in Literature (III),1929
'The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth' (I): references to Hardy's death in 1928

V. The Poet as Citizen, 1934
'The Cult of Personality', section vii; 'William Barnes'
'The Earliest Novels of Thomas Hardy'

****************

The Influence of Thomas Hardy on Q's Fiction

It is difficult to identify specific influences on Q's fiction. Q followed Hardy in using local events, folklore and oral history, but would probably have done so had he never encountered Hardy.

Q's extended short story I Saw Three Ships contains scenes reminiscent of Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, but it has a coastal not an inland setting.

Q's writings reject Hardy's concept of fate or any form of determinism.

TIMECHART 1840 to 1934

1840: Thomas Hardy born at Bockhampton, near Dorchester, in Dorset.

1846: Robert Peel repeals the Corn Laws.

1848: The Year of Revolutions in Europe.
Marx and Engels publish The Communist Manifesto.

1859: Charles Darwin publishes Origin of Species.

1863: Thomas Huxley publishes Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.
Q born at Bodmin in mid Cornwall.

1865: Hardy writes his first publishable poems (pub. 1898) and his first, unpublishable novel, The Poor Man and The Lady by the Poor Man (lost).

1868: Gladstone's 1st Administration (Liberal).

1869: Tolstoy publishes complete War and Peace.

1870: Death of Dr Jonathan Couch of Polperro (born 1789).
Hardy's 1st visit to Cornwall, March, where he meets Emma Gifford at St Juliot.
2nd visit to St Juliot where he courts Emma Gifford.
Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany.

1871: Hardy's 1st published novel, Desperate Remedies.

1872: Hardy – Under The Greenwood Tree.

1873: Hardy – A Pair of Blue Eyes.

1874: Hardy – Far From the Madding Crowd.
Thomas Hardy marries Emma Gifford.

1876: Hardy – The Hand of Ethelberta.

1877: Q's Bradley Wood, Devon, experience.

1878: Hardy – The Return of the Native.

1880: Hardy – The Trumpet Major.

1881: Hardy – A Laodicean.

1882: Hardy – Two in a Tower.
Q goes to Oxford University.

1887: Hardy – The Woodlanders.
Q leaves Oxford for London.
Q publishes his 1st novel, Dead Man's Rock.

1891: Hardy – Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Q is disturbed by its contents.

1892-3: Q and family leave London for Fowey.

1893: Q publishes 1st selection of poems, Green Bays.

1894: Hardy publishes the short story collection Life's Little Ironies.
Q analyses Hardy's Tess in the study, 'Mr. George Moore', published in The Speaker, and later republished in Adventures in Criticism.

1895: Hardy – Jude the Obscure, his last novel.

1896: Q publishes Adventures in Criticism, containing the study of Mr. George Moore, to which Hardy takes exception (Seymour-Smith, p. 827-8).

1898: Hardy publishes his 1st selection of poetry, WessexPoems, 1865-1898.

1901: Hardy publishes Poems of the Past and Present.

1904-8: Hardy publishes The Dynasts.

1905: Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.

1906: Campbell-Bannerman's Liberal Administration.

1909: Hardy publishes Time's Laughing Stocks.

1912: The death of Emma Hardy nee Gifford.

1913: January, Q gives his inaugural lecture as Professor of English Literature at Cambridge.

1914: Hardy publishes Satires of Circumstances.
Thomas Hardy marries Florence Dugdale.
August, the Great War begins.

1916: Campaigns on the Somme and Verdun:
Casualties – British 420,000; French 200,000;German 450,000
Establishment of the Lloyd-George – Bonar Law Coalition. The Liberal Party divided.
September, Thomas and Florence Hardy visit St Juliot in Cornwall.

1917: The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
Passchendaele Offensive:
Casualties – British 300,000: German 200,000
Hardy publishes Moments of Vision.

1918: Q publishes Studies in Literature I, with a study on 'The Poetry of Thomas Hardy'.
The Great War ends.
The 'Khaki' General Election.

1920: Q publishes On the Art of Reading.

1922: Q publishes Studies in Literature II.
Hardy receives an Hon. Fellowship of Queen's College, Oxford.

1923: Hardy publishes Late Lyrics and Earlier and The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall.

1925: Hardy publishes Human Shows.

1928: January, Hardy dies at Max Gate.
Winter Words is published posthumously.

1934: Q publishes The Poet as Citizen with 'The Earlier Novels of Thomas Hardy'.

3. Adventures in Criticism 1896

Introduction

When Adventures in Criticism was published in 1896, the horrors of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War were 80 years back, living only in the memory of the oldest members of society. The worse horrors of the Great War were 18 years away and unimaginable, while The Bolshevik Revolution was 21 years in the future. Liberalism, optimism and social reform dominated the political climate, with its ripples eddying outwards to Russia and Austro-Hungary.

The publication of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, with its pessimism and fatalism, must have come as a shock to many, although not to all, as the sales of the novel showed. Q was one who looked upon Tess with concern, especially as he almost certainly believed Hardy to be a novelist in full spate. He had no inkling that Jude the Obscure would be his next and last novel.

Q reveals his concern when writing in the radical paper The Speaker. On March 31, 1894, Q published in the paper a study of George Moore's Esther Waters, presenting it as one of the two most important novels of the time. The other was Hardy's Tess. The study is a calculated attack on Hardy. While it is unlikely that Hardy read The Speaker, he did read Adventures in Criticism, where the study was reprinted, and was less than amused. Whether it was having Tess compared with Esther Waters, or whether it was the nature of the attack that rankled is unclear; but it was many years before there was a reconciliation. Even then, Q never resiled on his critical position.

After the war, Q and Hardy developed a friendship, although it was a meeting of hearts rather than of minds. Later in life, Hardy became increasingly obsessed with the days of his courtship of Emma Gifford at St Juliot in 1870. As Q knew the area and its people, the basis of friendship was cemented.

References to Thomas Hardy in the 'causerie' 'Mr George Moore' from The Speaker of March 31, 1894.

George Moore (1852-1933) was an Irishman from County Mayo who studied art in Paris before going to London in 1880. He was a 'realist' novelist and playwright, influenced by Zola, who was later to be a major figure in the Irish cultural revival.

Q describes Moore's novel Esther Waters (1894) as comparable to Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891). There is a similarity of plot; yet Moore allows his characters to face fortune's mutability with the benefit of 'free will', while Hardy's characters have their fate determined by a malevolent providence, symbolised in the President of the Immortals.

Hardy seems to be struggling with the problems of evil and suffering, resolving it by blaming human tragedy on a force independent of human influence or control. Q rejects this resolution of the problem as it makes puppets of the novel's characters.

Q takes his argument further by denying that Dorset women, as Tess is supposed to be, are actually subject to any such nefarious influence. The novel is, therefore, inauthentic, with the subject matter being imposed upon the location. It is not a Dorset novel, but a novel imposed upon Dorset. Unsurprisingly, Hardy took grave exception to this. Seymour-Smith acknowledges the effect the 'causerie', had on Hardy, although Seymour-Smith does not appear to have read the 'causerie' himself.

According to Seymour-Smith, Hardy had not thought much of Q's Oxford Book of English Verse, published in 1900. Following the publication of On the Art of Writing, (wherein he refers to Lascelles Abercrombie's study of Hardy), in early 1916, the preface being dated to November 1915, Q sent a copy to Hardy to which the latter responded.

After the visit by Thomas and Florence Hardy to St Juliot in September 1916, Hardy and Q were again in communication. On October 22, with the Somme campaign drawing to a close, Hardy wrote to Q:

As to any other kind of writing interesting me . . . I sometimes wonder if it is not beneath the dignity of literature to attempt to please longer a world which is capable of atrocities as these days have brought, & think it ought to hold its peace for ever.

The letter states that he had forgiven Q for the 'slight' of 1896, 20 years before:

I cannot remember now what criticism of yours it was that I thought wrong – something you wrote in your salad days when your were more dogmatic than you probably are now. It was when I was interested in novels, which I have not been for the last 20 years and more. However, whatever it was it did not much hurt my feelings. I simply said to myself, "He be d—d: I know better." (At least I feel sure I said that, just because that's what the victim always says.)'

The argument Q employed was repeated in all his later writings on Hardy, even if more diplomatically expressed. In 'The Earlier Novels of Thomas Hardy', included in The Poet as Citizen of 1934, Q still sees Hardy as 'weaving life without a purpose' (Quiller-Couch, 1934, p. 216) as in Tess.

4. The Poetry of Thomas Hardy from Studies in Literature I

Introduction to Studies in Literature I

Q's preface to Studies in Literature I was written on May 10, 1918, when the German army was making rapid advances on the Western Front, the war appeared lost and a telegram announcing the death of Bevil was daily expected. 

Most of the material delivered at Cambridge was to men rejected for military service or disabled by wounds, and to women from Girton and Newnham not employed in full-time war work. Not only was Britain facing military defeat by Germany, but also the distant rumblings of revolution following the Soviet takeover of Russia, led by Lenin and Trotsky. Q realised the threat to British Liberal democracy and to the culture underpinning it. His Cambridge lectures were his response to that threat.

The first lecture printed in Studies in Literature I was 'The Commerce of Thought'. Q argued that English culture was rooted in the Mediterranean, not in an insular Anglo-Saxonism, with further influences from Persia, India and the Rig-veda, and the Americas. The best of European culture was to be found in the ancient universities – Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna and Salamanca. Russia and Germany were passed over in silence because rooted in different soil.

In Studies in Literature I are three of the most important lectures he gave. They contain the foundation stones of his thought. These lectures cover what is now termed the 'metaphysical poets': Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne and Crashaw. Q attempts to show how these poets, rooted in classicism and Anglicanism (Crashaw converted to Rome), saw the Universe as a divine harmony, as true of Plato as of Dante, a 'Harmony' not a 'Chaos', and although humans cannot 'comprehend', they can 'apprehend' this, reflecting it in their 'Soul'.

Q left his audience to set against this for themselves Russian Bolshevism and the 'Manifesto to the Civilized World', a document signed by 93 internationally known intellectuals, including physicist Max Planck, but not Einstein who, in endeavouring to justify the invasion of Belgium and various atrocities 'denied all guilt and picture German militarism as the blameless defender of German culture' (Hoffman and Dukas, p. 103).

The lectures on 'The Commerce of Thought' and 'Some Seventeenth Century Poets' are followed by lectures on 19th century poets: George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and the novelist Charles Reade. This was to ensure that the English Tripos was a 'Study of English down to our own times' (Quiller-Couch, 1919, p. 168) so as to ensure the future of the language, 'one of the glories of our birth and state' (ibid., p. 169).

Q was aware of the corrupting influence of poor English, as he demonstrated in On the Art of Writing, especially 'Interlude: On Jargon' and 'Some Principles Reaffirmed'. Journalese, political discourse and the writings of scientists came under scrutiny. Quoting Sir James Barrie: 'The Man of Science appears to be the only man who has something to say, just now – and the only man who does not know how to say it' (Quiller-Couch, 1916, p. 162). No doubt Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany would provide Q with further evidence of the corruption of language and its consequences.

In 'Mr George Moore' Q names Thomas Hardy as an important Victorian novelist, whose works he highly regarded. In Studies in Literature I, he identifies Hardy as an important poet, one still producing significant work at the age of 78. The praise is not unqualified. What is in question is not the quality of the inspiration or the quality of the language, but a perceived flaw in the nature of the vision, exemplified in the fatalism and determinism of the novel Tess.

Q appeared to see the Devon writer S.T. Coleridge and the Dorset writer Thomas Hardy as lost leaders. They had failed, although in different ways and for different reasons, in articulating the ultimate vision of all great writings, from the time of Plato to his own, the 'apprehension' that 'the Universe is not a Chaos but a Harmony' (Quiller-Couch, 1919, p. 121).

The Lecture: 'The Poetry of Thomas Hardy'

Section I

There is a somewhat wistful opening to the lecture. Q was born in 1863, entered Oxford in 1882 and elected a professor at Cambridge in 1912, when he was 49 years old. In 1918, when he spoke on Thomas Hardy, he was 56, only six years younger than his father when he died. He was getting on for 40 years older than some in the audience. He was an ageing man!

Q presents Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley as poets of a long past generation. Tennyson, Browning and Matthew Arnold were the idols of his youth, followed a little later by Morris and Swinburne, and a little later again by Francis Thompson and W.B. Yeats. And all but Yeats were dead.

A chasm had opened up between the poets he had known and revered and the generation listening to him in the New Arts Theatre. Into that chasm had fallen the rising generation of 'poets and prophets' – Rupert Brook (1915), Julian Grenfell, D.S.O., (1916), Edward Wyndham Tennant (1916) and Jeffery Day (1918), Wilfred Owen (1918), with Ivor Gurney consigned for the last 15 years of his life to a mental institution (E. Swinton, pp. 721-726) – all victims of the 'struggle-for-life competition, Nature's first law' which Q condemned in 'Shelley I' (Quiller-Couch, 1922, p. 45).

There was one anomaly: Thomas Hardy. Born 25 years after Waterloo, he was 74 when the Great War opened and 78 when it closed. He would outlive all the above except for Yeats and Gurney. Unlike the long-lived William Wordsworth, who died only 13 years before Q was born, Hardy went on producing quality verse to the end, although Q could not know this at the time of the lecture in 1918. Quite remarkably, Hardy was ten when Wordsworth died, and died himself after T.S. Eliot had written The Wasteland (1922 )and The Hollow Men (1925).

When Q gives his lectures on Byron and Shelley in the post-war period, he reassesses their relevance. The importance of Byron needed to be proclaimed 'just now'. Q discerns a direct parallel between the post-Napoleonic period and the post-Great War period. Byron and Shelley have something important to say, more so than Hardy and, indeed, than Eliot. (see 'Tradition and Orthodoxy' in The Poet as Citizen). Byron and Shelley spoke for the voices silenced by wounds and death.

Section 2

Q reviews Hardy's output as a novelist from Desperate Remedies of 1871 to Jude the Obscure of 1895; and as a poet from Wessex Poems of 1895 to Moments of Vision of 1917. He also alludes to the epic drama The Dynasts, to which he returns in Section Seven.

Section 3

Q throws out a challenge to his youthful audience. Hardy's supposed 'pessimism' is not a pose or a sentimental attitude, it cannot be dismissed as passé by idealistic youth, for it presents an ever-present challenge which each generation has to face and 'solve' as best it can.

Today, we possess a very jaundiced attitude to the inter-war period: industrial decline, unemployment, hunger marches and appeasement. But with the close of the Great War, the 'War to End All Wars', the establishment of liberal democracies throughout western Europe, the rise of new industries in south-east England and the dramatic advances in science and technology, gave reasons for hope and a religion of progress to replace Anglican traditionalism.

Q had known idealistic hope in his younger days, only to see it dashed by the forces of conservatism both in the House of Commons and German militarism on the continent of Europe. He sympathised with the idealism of his audience and did not want to douse it with cynicism, but he did want to temper it with realism, and Hardy was his useful vehicle, particularly because the Dorset man was a very fine novelist and poet.

Section 4

Q contrasts Hardy's 'pessimism', which is that of a thoughtful man who is unable to resolve his 'perplexities', with the 'cheap kind of pessimism' found in a more intellectual man, Matthew Arnold. Q never confuses intellect with intelligence. Arnold's pessimism was based on creative failure turned into a 'theory of dessication'.

Hardy, by contrast, discovers in age a purer lyricism, one rooted in the speech of his native Dorset. In his first volume of published poetry, Hardy struggles to escape from the constrictions of prose. This leads Q to lighten the lecture by quoting Stevenson when he claims that it came to him as a surprise to learn of Hardy's 'stillicide' as the dripping of water in a cavern rather than a criminal offence:

In the muted measured note
Of a ripple under archways, or a lone cave's stillicide

Q regarded the collection Moments of Vision, published on November 30, 1917, - three weeks after the close of the Passchendale campaign and on the day the German counter attack at Cambrai achieved its final objectives – as the point when Hardy achieved his spiritual breakthrough. The work included 17 poems on the war. Hardy was 77 years old.

Section 5

His analysis of the nature and substance of the breakthrough in this section is possibly the most important Q wrote on Hardy. He knew it of Hardy because he knew it of himself. To understand Hardy as a writer it is necessary to navigate downwards, not sideways, through Norman, Dane, Saxon, Celt, Iber and the tribes of pre-history, even into the soil and the rocks. How this is to be done, Q gives us a clue in the prologue to his last and unfinished novel Castle Dor. In the early 1840s – at the time when Hardy was a boy – Dr Carfax stood on the earthworks of Castle Dor in Cornwall, a location Q believed to be mentioned in the medieval romance Tristan and Iseult, aware that below him was a 'palimpsest' of history, as an 'owl hooted up from the woods' and the dawn broke.

Q dismisses the notion of Hardy being understood on the basis of contemporary thought: rationalism, scientism, positivism, scientific socialism and the like. More primitive forms of awareness have to be explored, with primitive not being the same as inferior. This entailed going downwards into oral history, including folklore and legend, along with 'the high burial ground of a British chieftain', and the rural labourer's instinctive knowledge of birds, animals and plants.

What particularly struck Hardy, according to Q, was the depth of suffering in nature, something, presumably, which he felt Darwinism supported; also in women, as with the epigraph to Tess:

Poor wounded name! my bosom as a bed
Shall lodge thee . . .' (Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, I.2.115-6)

Q compares the tragedy of Tess to that of Cleopatra. Rhoda Brook was also a dairymaid and did 'the meanest chares'.

Section 6

The theme of women's suffering is developed in section six:

For women it must be certainly unpromising to read the doctrine of Jude the Obscure, which works out to this, that man's aspirations to make the world better are chiefly clogged by the flesh, and that flesh is woman. (Quiller-Couch, 1919, p.205).

When Hardy read Tolstoy's War and Peace, which Seymour-Smith informs us he did in the 1889 translation (Seymour-Smith, p. 660), he would have found a reflection of Q's words in the conversation between Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezuhov in Book I, chapter 6.

Prince Andrei: 'Never, never marry, my dear fellow. That is my advice to you – don't marry until you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of doing, and until you cease to love the woman of your choice and see her plainly, as she really is; or else you will be making a cruel and irreparable mistake.'

Hardy saw women's suffering as a timeless suffering, a suffering which cried out in folk story and legend, and echoed through the stone circles and chalk uplands of Dorset. He then goes deeper:

Has some Vast Imbecility,
Mighty to build and blend,
But impotent to tend,
Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry? (Hardy, 'Nature's Questioning (43).)

The popularity of Hardy's novels and poems was possibly because they expressed ideas current at some levels of society, especially those influenced by Darwin and Thomas Huxley where nature has been separated from a benevolent creator and placed under impersonal laws and a struggle for existence. Hardy even detects a malevolent creator. Q sees this as a 'childless creed', one without hope.

Section 7

In the penultimate section of the lecture, Q confronts what he possibly felt to be Hardy's finest achievement, the 'grand ironic drama, The Dynasts'. In this work all of Hardy's poems combine into 'the grandest poetic structure planned and raised in England in our time' (Quiller-Couch, 1919, p.207). The Dorset writer has become a European one.

Ever sensitive to historical parallels, Q detects a similarity between the Europe of the Napoleonic War, described in The Dynasts, and the Europe of the Great War. Q quotes from Hardy's stage direction of Europe as 'a prone and emaciated figure' with its peoples 'writhing, crawling, heaving', a 'picture of Europe today'!

Q summarizes the next part of The Dynasts dealing with the Napoleonic War in Europe from the battle of Austerlitz in December 1805 to the retreat of Sir John Moore through north-west Spain in January 1809, the subject of Q's short story Rain of Dollars.

In War and Peace, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is an adjutant on Kutuzov's staff at the battle of Austerlitz. He leads a counter-attack against the French capture of a Russian battery. Having been seriously injured in the action he is subsequently conveyed to a French dressing station on the orders of Napoleon. Lying semi-conscious on the Pratzen Heights he looks into the sky.

How different do these clouds float across the lofty, limitles sky . . .how happy I am to have found it at last . . .all is delusion except these infinite heavens.'(Tolstoy, p. 362).

Interestingly, there was an adjutant on Kutusov's staff called Prince Volkonsky and he did lead a charge on the Pratzen Heights, but survived unwounded. Maybe Tolstoy was mixing fact with fiction as Q did in his historical novels. (See 1805: Austerlitz by R. Goetz, pp. 202-5).

In the last paragraph of this section, Q compares the 'philosophy' of Hardy's The Dynasts with that of Tolstoy's War and Peace. He sees both as portraying Napoleon as, in the words of Plato, 'at best a plaything for the gods' (Quiller-Couch, 1919, p.209. They disagree that Tolstoy sees purpose in the 'Divinity' while Hardy sees no purpose:

Like a knitter drowsed,
Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness,
The will has woven with an absent heed
Since life first was; and ever will weave (Hardy, The Dynasts, quoted in ibid., p. 209).

With his interest in historical parallels it would not have been lost on Q that on June 22, 1941, Hitler ordered 3.3 million German soldiers to cross the River Bug at Brest Litovsk, where the German- Russian peace treaty had been signed on December 15, 1917, and other convenient places, to follow the path taken by Napoleon. Jonathan Dimbleby, in Barbarossa, also recognised the parallel:

[Hitler's] Grande Armée was similarly the largest military force that had ever been assembled. He had also won a major battle at Smolensk, from where he went on to prevail upon the blood-soaked field of Borodino, a mere 110 kilometres from Moscow. But when his victorious troops marched into the city, they found it abandoned and on fire. By the end of the year, six months after launching his campaign, what was left of his half-starved and frost-bitten forces was driven out of Russia never to return (Dimbleby, p. 255).

Section 8

Q concluded the lecture with 'Friends Beyond' (36) from Wessex Poems of 1898, Hardy's first published collection. It is set in the corner of a churchyard, presumably with Stinsford (Mellstock) in mind. Yet the poem is not about his own friends and relations, but the characters of his novels, particularly those with some connection to the local church band or quire:

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 poem bears a similarity of Q's poem 'The Planted Heel', yet a similarity only. In 'The Planted Heel' Q surveys the headstones of his forebears in Talland churchyard, which is between Looe and Polperro in south-east Cornwall. It appears in the collection Poems and Ballads of 1896, two years before the publication of Wessex Poems, being the second published collection. Q addresses the graves, as does Hardy, but only those of his own forbears, questioning what from them has come down to him. It is an Anglican poem in that a divinity presides over proceedings.

All those Q reflects upon were Anglicans, yet two generations are excluded. His grandfather, Dr Jonathan Couch, left Anglicanism for Methodism in 1812, and is buried in non-conformist ground at Maple Burrows. Of Jonathan's children, few if any were interred at Talland. 

'Friends Beyond' is significantly different. The people mentioned come from his parents' and grandparents' generations. Yet they were actually his literary children, the creation of his pen. Unlike himself, they were traditional Anglicans, often with an association with the church band. These bands were dissolved with the coming of the church organ. It is likely that Hardy heard a church band in Stinsford or in isolated St Juliot, although it is unlikely that Q did.

There is a church band or 'quire' in Q's extended short story I Saw Three Ships, set in the parish of Talland. The church of 'Ruan Lanihale' fits Talland exactly, even to the point of having a detached tower. The story is set between 1800 and 1810, when Jonathan was still a practising Anglican. The band was located in the 'west gallery' – churches were traditionally built east-west. In 1849, a major renovation was conducted and it is possible that the western gallery and the band disappeared altogether.

The church band or 'quire' was still in operation at the time of Under the Greenwood Tree, but disappeared subsequently. Of those mentioned in 'Friends Beyond', William Dewy played the bass-viol, Tranter Reuben Dewy the violin, and if Robert is Robert Penny, he was another member. When the group went carol singing, the first call was to Farmer Ledlow. When William Dewy speaks from the grave to Thomas Hardy he said: 'You mid burn the old bass-viol that I set such value by.'

The church band had gone for good, as had Dewy and his world. 'Friends Beyond' is a lament for a past world at Stinsford and neighbouring villages. It is also a lament for the fictional world of Hardy's novels. 

When Hardy wrote 'Friends Beyond' he was a mildly practising but not believing Anglican. Presumably, those in the poem were both, although not in a profoundly reflective way – as might have been more the case with local dissenters, a group of people Hardy rarely mentions.

There is a question of what Hardy meant by 'Beyond' – beyond what? This becomes more problematic when Hardy claims to hear them 'whispering' to him – whispering for what purpose? The poem is possibly an extended metaphor with the churchyard as his own mind. Yet the characters seem to have an objective existence in a sort of Greek Hades, although interest in human affairs. Nor has the 'Trine', presumably the Trinity.

In 'The Planted Heel', Q sees a connection between the churchyard, his forebears and a divinity. Hardy sees no such connection. He is isolated even from the characters of his own fiction. Many people in Hardy's day and even more today, possibly the majority, must feel the same sort of isolation as Hardy describes. One must wonder at the effect the reading of Friends Beyond, delivered by a master of verse, had on the audience of the new arts theatre at Cambridge.

5. 'The Earlier Novels of Thomas Hardy' from The Poet as Citizen 1934

Section 1

Q opens his lecture by repeating his condemnation of the press coverage which followed Hardy's death and funeral in 1928.

In the main part of this section he tries to recreate the experience of encountering Hardy's novels for the first time at Clifton College and then at Oxford, with 1880 as a possible initial date. Hardy's first novel, Desperate Remedies had been published nine years before, followed by Under the Greenwood Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes. Yet it was Far from the Madding Crowd that fell into Q's hands in 1880, followed by Under the Greenwood Tree, resulting in a sensation of having 'overed a stile upon an undiscovered country' yet one 'he had always known' (Quiller-Couch, 1934, p.198).

It must have taken Q back to his grandparents' farm at Abbotskerswell, with its seed time and harvest, milking and sheep shearing. What appeared to be 'epoch-making' had in fact come from seeds long germinating in the soil of England.

Section 2

The genius of Hardy was to make the reader aware of what had always been as though it were new, a unique revelation, and a revelation others were to follow.

The lengthy opening paragraph of the printed lecture is of remarkable interest to the Q specialist, being an exposition of his own philosophical position. It is expressed in more personal terms than can be found in his lectures on the metaphysical poets or in The Art of Reading. Q points out, although without actually mentioning Hardy, that intimate descriptions of the natural scene exist in the writings of Gilbert White and others from the century before, although presented slightly differently, without the tendency of an 'introspective age':

As you pass along, you command a noble view of the wild, or weald, on one hand and the sea on the other. Mr Rae used to visit a family just at the foot of these hills, and was so ravished with the prospect from Plumpton Plain, near Lewes, that he mentions these scapes in his "wisdom of God in the works of the Creation" with the utmost satisfaction. . .(Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne)

Q comments: 

It throws me back to momentary scenes of my boyhood – to one in particular, when the sight of a green glade shelving down to a stream through Bradley Woods in Devon brought tears out of nothing but its sheer beauty, and a child's ache to run and "tell about it" (Quiller-Couch, 1934, p.200).

Q's Bradley Wood experience and another at Lerryn are recounted in Memories and Opinions (p.65).

Section 3

Section Three is a digression on the development of English prose which he deals with at greater length in the preface to The Oxford Book of English Prose of 1925.

Section 4

Hardy started to write in 1868 when, according to Q, prose tended to the urban. In 1870, Middlemarch was being written by George Eliot, The Adventures of Harry Richmond by George Meredith and Trollope was in full flow. Hardy questioned whether rural Dorset was considered tasteful and critically acceptable. His second wife said in The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, from which Q quotes: ' . . .he took no interest in manners, but in the substance of life only . . .long habit had accustomed him to solitary living . . .'.(ibid., p.204).

Section 5

Section Five opens with the word 'Gentlemen' when a good number of female students occupied the front seats of the New Arts Theatre. The English department, as with others at Cambridge, were not permitted to accept women. The authorities opposed Q's open door policy. Not only did he accept them at the lectures, he also accepted them at discussion groups. The women of Girton and Newnham appreciated his attitude, even more so because of its rarity. It certainly did not extend to the sciences, philosophy and mathematics.

Q then draws a subtle yet telling parallel. Writers such as Hardy, coming from a rural and working background, felt excluded from literary and academic culture. Hardy's early novels were 'debilitated' by the writer's sense of educational and social inferiority. This led to stilted language and inadequately drawn characters, with the novel Two in a Tower used as an illustration. Yet, as one early critic observed, 'Here is a man capable of lifting the English novel out of a social rut'. Emma Gifford was his inspiration. Others followed his lead, one being Q himself!

Section 6

Q returns to the personal with a reminiscence of how having read Far From the Madding Crowd he sought after the earlier novels and then fell upon each new publication as it appeared at the bookstall. 

The main point offers a profound insight into Hardy and into Q. As a probationary architect and an unrecognised poet Hardy took to novel writing, not because he believed himself to have a gift, but out of economic necessity. The first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady – by the Poor Man, of 1868, was turned down by publishers. Having met his future wife, Emma Gifford, at St Juliot in 1870, the need for money became urgent. The result was Desperate Remedies of 1871, followed by Under the Greenwood Tree of 1872 and A Pair of Blue Eyes of 1873.

Hardy's sense of social inferiority, which according to Q reached its zenith in the writing of the Woodlanders and broke forth in angry indignation in Jude the Obscure, had a negative influence on his creative vision. It also fuelled the growing conflict in his marriage as Emma rejected his growing antipathy to Anglicanism; although Q remembered Emma Hardy as a very loyal wife.

Q took to novel writing to pay off his father's debts and then, at the age of 25, to marry Louisa Amelia Hicks of Fowey – much against the wishes of Mrs Hicks who regarded Q as socially inferior, without sufficient income and, presumably, of unsound political opinions. Q's first novel, Dead Man's Rock, was written out of economic necessity, fortunately without initial rejection by a publisher. His second, Troy Town, as light and attractive as Under the Greenwood Tree, was also a success. Whether Mrs Hicks was ever properly reconciled is unknown!

Q could not equal Hardy as a novelist and poet, but he understood the problems Hardy faced, thus giving him a unique insight into Hardy's genius. Q's audience in the New Arts Theatre at Cambridge would have had no notion of the parallels.

Section 7

This section is divided into two parts.

The first discusses Hardy's insight into the female psyche. Apparently, some women accused Hardy of being a woman writing under a man's name.

The second is an account of the bond between Hardy and Q. After the death of Emma in 1912 (and in spite of an affair with Florence Dugdale, later Florence Hardy, when Emma was still alive), Hardy 'constructed a pure fairy-tale' out of his courtship of Emma Gifford in 1870. The death inspired a body of lyric poetry. Hardy loved to talk about St Juliot, and Q, 'one familiar with those scenes', proved a knowledgeable and willing listener.

Section 8

Q draws attention to the uneven quality of Hardy's novels – an unevenness Q also suffered from! In Hardy's case it was the result of economic necessity – probably also true of Q – combined with a lack of poetic recognition, the area where his true genius lay. Q's assessment:

The Poor Man and the Lady – By the Poor Man: an immature work resulting in unsatisfactory and misunderstood advice from publishers' consultants John Morley and George Meredith.

Desperate Remedies: the deleterious result of the advice offered.

Under the Greenwood Tree: near perfect.

A Pair of Blue Eyes: problems of character, dialogue and structure.

Far from the Madding Crowd: a work of budding genius.

The Hand of Ethelberta: unsatisfactory.

The Return of the Native: a recovery of quality writing.

The Trumpet Major: another quality novel.

A Laodicean: an unsatisfactory work, in part because dictated during an illness to fulfil a publisher's contract.

Section 9

Even though The Poor Man and the Lady was a failure, it contained seeds later to flower into 'epic prose'. Q identifies the fire at the Tranter's cottage as an example. It leads into the 'fire' in Far from the Madding Crowd. A similar 'epic passage' is found in the 'famous lay-out of Egdon Heath' in The Return of the Native. This should be read in light of an entry in Hardy's note-book of September 28, 1877.

An object or mark raised by man on the scene is worth ten times any such formed by unconscious Nature. Hence clouds, mists and mountains are unimportant beside the wear on a threshold, or the print of a hand (Hardy in Quiller-Couch, ibid., p. 213).

Q then includes an 'earlier declaration' by Hardy: 'The poetry of a scene varies with the minds of the perceivers. Indeed it does not lie in the scene at all' (ibid).

Section 10

The penultimate section reveals the breadth and depth of Q's learning which forms the basis of his criticism. In a few paragraphs he ranges from 20th century educational reform to 19th century novels, then back to the Trivium and Quadrivium of the Middle Ages, and finally to Plato. Through it all he is questioning the view presented 'through the lips of an immature astronomer, the illimitable depths and despair of the heavens' from Two on a Tower:

And to add a new weirdness to what the sky possesses in its size and formlessness there is involved the quality of decay. For all the wonder of these everlasting spheres, eternal stars and what not, they are not eternal: they burn out like candles (Hardy in ibid., p.214).

Q claims the speaker to be oblivious to any 'regulating purpose', except that of a 'drowsy immanent Will'.

The argument between Hardy and Q is as much alive today, even if clothed indifferent language. Q had no time for those who claim disciplines to be intellectually ring-fenced, capable of working as completely independent entities. Knowledge is a unity, as is the universe and as should be human society and the human psyche. It is an evolving not a static or stagnant unity. Maybe, facing environmental and nuclear catastrophe we are finally being forced to face this fact.

Section 11

The final section is impossible to summarize as it is full of insights and allusions, no more so than in the 'parable' concluding it.

Q suggests Hardy's life to have had a purpose and a structure, maybe more obvious from the outside than the inside. In arguing for purposelessness Hardy was arguing against himself.

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