The Life of Thomas Hardy
sex soil. One feels it in New York and in London and Paris; one hears its quiverings in scraps of talk, in the strange wistful twist with which people force themselves, quasi-incredulously, to speak of the material reality of the Wessex poet. "Wessex" lives: the novels, the lyrics, The Dynasts, The Queen of Cornwall, but that Wessex domain is the creation of a mere man who sat down to put mere words to paper. This man has now achieved a spiritual tyranny over what could be, before his time, only the after-life of the old Kingdom of Alfred the Great. Wessex the idea, the Wessex of the mind, that is to say the real Wessex, is now Thomas Hardy's own. To one who has surrendered to the experience of this idea, the physical southwest English county known as Dorsetshire has passed out of existence.
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Well, you walk back into Dorchester. (No one will mistake you if you call it Casterbridge). You pause to look into the window of a stationery shop. The usual photographic post cards are displayed for sale. But they don't show "real" places at all. They are, for the most part, captioned and sold as illustrations to the Hardy novels and poems. Few sets for Dorchester, but many sets for The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders. The aura is not merely "literary." Not even the natives consider their own countryside as something real. Their familiar places have little to do with ponderable matter; the “real” people who now go to and fro in them are only phantoms. These places are real only in so far as
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