Wessex Twilight (November, 1923)
they are the places where Clym Yeobright and Tess Durbeyfield rejoiced a little and suffered much. Thomas Hardy is a wizard who has enchanted the land, turned it into something which has no longer an objective existence. Its imaginative, subjective reality is so much stronger.
All this is of course just a mood, and perhaps a deceptive one. All the same, it's there; and being felt, it's real. And in the years to come, you may reflect, Wessex might indeed partake of a magic comparable in quality to that enjoyed by Stratford-on-Avon. It has already drained away some of the glamor of the Lakes.
Just see how you react to that drove of sheep trotting across the fair grounds, followed by a shaggy dog and a shepherd with his tall crook. He's not just a shepherd. He's Gabriel Oak. The Dorchester fair grounds are not just fair grounds. They are the place where Henchard sold his wife.
There are children, released from school, playing in a field. Black birds soar over their heads, flutter down and settle on the meadows. The birds are rooks. Where is the boy Jude with his clacker, to scare them away for Farmer Troutham?—and to be so terribly attacked, both by the brutal farmer and by still more brutal Weltschmerz?
Here are Maumbry Bings, the grassy Roman amphitheatre, surrounded by gnarled oaks, symbolic of the relentless tread of Fate. Here Michael Henchard kept tryst with his Susan, and here you, as well as Henchard (as the villagers tell you) may still, on occasion, glimpse the shades of Vespasian's legions at dusk.
[13]
