THE LANDSCAPE OF THOMAS HARDY.1 It is the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of finesse in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water. HAD WALTER PATER: The Renaissance. AD Thomas Hardy never lived and written, the home of his birth and its environment would still exercise an abiding spell upon all those who love rural England, and who, pre-eminently in the southern counties, find the attractions of summer and rural life perhaps more strongly emphasised than in even most of the many other favoured portions of Britain. One must, nevertheless, thank Mr. Hardy as one would a sign-board that points out some unfamiliar but alluring way, 1 The season of the year referred to is that of middle June. for guiding one so minutely to Wessex in general, and Dorset in particular. The fact that the attraction previously existed just as it exists at present; that then as now from Roman rampart and ancient castrum, from ivied chantry and undulating down, from graceful abbey and crumbling priory, there was a story to be told or elements of beauty to be fondly treasured, counts but little, to Mr. Hardy belongs none the less the merit of the discovery. Without him there were no Valley of the Var, no Wellbridge, no Blackmoor Vale. At least, they would exist remote from alien eyes, to all intent and purpose familiar to the locality alone. He is, in truth, the romantic index of Dorset, as Jefferies is the poetic exponent of Wiltshire, and Gilbert White the expositor of Hants. Few who have written are as conversant with the history, topography, and physiognomy of their native land. One must equally search far and wide for one who knows a country-folk and ways appertaining to local rusticity so intimately as he, - most signally typified by that grotesque assemblage who with antique garb and Boeotian dialect, disport and moralise beneath The Greenwood Tree. He feels and reflects the genius of country places much |