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CHAPTER 1: UNDER the GREENWOOD TREE OR the Mellstock QUIRE?

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CHAPTER 1: UNDER the GREENWOOD TREE OR the Mellstock QUIRE? Notes PRELUDE 1. The story 'The Distracted Preacher' (1879) has a similarly real topographical and historical environment. CHAPTER 1: UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE OR THE MELlSTOCK QUIRE? 1. The leaf is reproduced in facsimile between pp. 112 and 113 of the first volume of Hardy's autobiography, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, published under the name of his second wife Florence in 1928. The manuscript itself is in the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester. 2. The exception is the group of substantial changes that Hardy made to the historical and environmental elements in the narrative. The notes to the World's Classics edition of the novel point out the most important of these alterations. 3. There is something of the same attitude perceptible when John Upjohn in The Woodlanders, reflecting on what might have happened to the superior doctor Fitzpiers when he fell asleep on horseback on his way home, says: 'you might ha' been a-wownded into tatters a'most, and no brother tradesman to jine your few limbs together within seven mile!' (p. 161) 4. It should not be surprising, considering the titles of the novels, to find aspects of Under the Greenwood Tree repeated in Far From the Madding Crowd written two years later. We would expect the later novel to be similarly remote from centres of urban sophisticated culture, and to adopt a similarly pastoral mode of perception. And indeed there is also in Far From the Madding Crowd a similar concern with the right way to do things, such as sleeping in a hut, making a proposal, getting a job, quenching a fire, dipping, shearing and curing sheep, saving a rick. However this fascination with how (or how not) to do things diminishes considerably towards the end of the later novel, as the power of the individuality of the four main characters pushes all else aside. 5. Hardy reserves his account of that perpetual nineteenth-century concern, the clash between the exceptional individual and the functioning society for The Return of the Native and some subsequent novels. His approach to this question (examined in Chapter five of this study) is directly related to J. S. Mill's On Liberty. 183 184 Notes to pp. 18-25 6. It is interesting in this context that in 1912 Hardy added pocket in place of world, a financial for a social distinction. CHAPTER 2: HARDY'S DANCES 1. In most of his novels that centre on the life of rural workfolk there are similar occasions to be marked by a dance. In The Return of the Native the Yeobrights hold a traditional Christmas dance in which they wait upon their guests, and May-Day is celebrated with a dance; in 'The Three Strangers' Shepherd Fennel and his wife hold a dance to mark the christening of their child; in The Mayor of Casterbridge Elizabeth-Jane's wedding is confirmed in a dance, while both Henchard and Farfrae feel that an appropriate way to commemorate 'a national event' is by a dance. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles Whitsun is marked by a dance, and the community expressed through the dance can incorporate the alien Angel Clare for the time. It is only in The Woodlanders, and more strikingly in Jude the Obscure, that dance is not a measure of the stability of the fundamentals of that society. In The Woodlanders the only dance is one in which Giles Winterbome attempts to help on his suit for the hand of Grace Melbury by providing a Christmas party for her and her family. Giles has asked Marty South's opinion about the efficacy of the party, and she replies: 'Is there to be dancing?' 'There might be, certainly?' 'Will He dance with Her?' 'Well, yes.' 'Then it might bring things to a head, one way or the other­ I won't be the maid to say which.' The occasion turns out a disaster, for Giles (unlike the tranter or Mrs Yeobright) is unaccustomed to hosting such parties, and when the Hintock Band begins to play: Grace had been away from home for so long, and was so drilled in new dances, that she had forgotten the old figures, and hence did not join in the movement. Then Giles felt that all was over. As for her, she was thinking, as she watched the gyrations, of a very different measure that she had been accustomed to tread with a bevy of sylph-like creatures in muslin in the music-room of a large house. (p. 75) It is characteristic that Hardy should have Giles recognize his defeat in the fact that Grace will not dance the traditional figures of the Notes to pp. 25-33 185 country-dances, but dreams of the waltzes and polkas that she has learned in a different environment, early examples of the closed-couple dances that will usurp the country-dances almost universally by 1914. In Jude the Obscure there are no dances, just as there is no sense, even at Marygreen, of a rural culture, and, as Chapter 8 of this book attempts to show, no sense of community whatsoever. Weddings are funerals, and in western culture at least, even in Ireland, there is not normally dancing at wakes. 2. 'The Egalitarian Waltz' in What is Dance? ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) pp. 521-32. 3. It is an indication of the essentially rural nature even of the county-town Casterbridge that at the wedding-dance of Donald Farfrae and Elizabeth-Jane Newson in The Mayor of Casterbridge the guests dance country dances, not waltzes. 4. The climax in Hardy's writing of the connection between music and dance is in 'The Fiddler of the Reels', and the crisis of the story needs to be read in full to experience the almost magical effect Mop Ollamoor's fiddling has on Car'line Aspent: ... at that very moment a five-handed reel was proposed, in which two or three begged her to join. She declined on the plea of being tired and having to walk to Stickleford, when Mop began aggressively tweedling 'My Fancy-Lad,' in D major, as the air to which the reel was to be footed. He must have recognized her, though she did not know it, for it was the strain of all seductive strains which she was least able to resist - the one he had played when she was leaning over the bridge at the date of their first acquaintance. Caroline stepped despairingly into the middle of the room with the other four. Reels were resorted to hereabouts at this time by the more robust spirits, for the reduction of superfluous energy which the ordinary figure-dances were not powerful enough to exhaust. As everybody knows, or does not know, the five reelers stood in the form of a cross, the reel being performed by each line of three alternately, the persons who successively came to the middle place dancing in both directions. Car'line soon found herself in this place, the axis of the whole performance, and could not get out of it, the tune turning into the first part without giving her opportunity. And now she began to suspect that Mop did know her, and was doing this on purpose, though whenever she stole a glance at him his closed eyes betokened obliviousness to everything outside his own brain. She continued to wend her way through the figure of 8 that was formed by her course, the fiddler introducing into his notes the wild and agonizing sweetness of a living voice in one too highly wrought; its pathos running high and running low in endless variation, projecting through her 186 Notes to pp. 33-34 nerves excruciating spasms, a sort of blissful torture. The room swam, the tune was endless; and in about a quarter of an hour the only other woman in the figure dropped out exhausted, and sank panting on a bench. The reel instantly resolved itself into a four-handed one. Caro­ line would have given anything to leave off; but she had, or fancied she had, no power, while Mop played such tunes; and thus another ten minutes slipped by, a haze of dust now clouding the candles, the floor being of stone, sanded. Then another dancer fell out - one of the men - and went into the passage in a frantic search for liquor. To turn the figure into a three-handed reel was the work of a second, Mop modulating at the same time into 'The Fairy Dance,' as better suited to the contracted movement, and no less one of those foods of love which, as manufactured by his bow, had always intoxicated her. In a reel for three there was no rest whatever, and four or five minutes were enough to make her remaining two partners, now thoroughly blown, stamp their last bar, and, like their predecessors, limp off into the next room to get something to drink. Caroline, half-stifled inside her veil, was left dancing alone, the apartment now being empty of everybody save herself, Mop, and their little girl. She flung up the veil, and cast her eyes upon him, as if imploring him to withdraw himself and his acoustic magnetism from the atmosphere. Mop opened one of his own orbs, as though for the first time, fixed it peeringly upon her, and smiling dreamily, threw into his strains the reserve of expression which he could not afford to waste on a big and noisy dance. Crowds of little chromatic subtleties, capable of drawing tears from a statue, proceeded straightway from the ancient fiddle, as if it were dying of the emotion which had been pent up within it ever since its banishment from some Italian or German city where it first took shape and sound.
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