The Life of Thomas Hardy
tragedies, in the manner foreordained by the Will." Under such a mental attitude the terrain came to life. Spirits dead, living, unborn, invested every stone, every tree, everything raised by the hand of man. The real involved itself inextricably with the spectre of the real.
Under such an emotional radiation, also, the past and the present must of necessity have become deeply involved with each other and interblended. The soil and its fruit: the ground itself, its vegetation, its animal life, its human product or parasite whose activities here and there resulted in physical denudations and excrescences: roads and ditches, churches and dwellings—all these have played both a real and a transcendental role in Hardy's cosmos. Hardy himself must be taken as a part of it, too.
"Wessex" can not be considered, then, merely as it reproduces itself photographically through human sensory reactions today. Its history must be invoked to cast over it something of the romantic glow in which Hardy's imagination has thrived. And not merely its conventional modern history alone, important as this may be, but even its geology and its prehistory.
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Fishy beings of low development, then dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles, then shadowy, sinister crocodilian outlines: alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating in the colossal lizard, iguanodon—these beasties we must first imagine as peopling the more ancient geological deposits of southwestern England. Hardy's Henry Knight, hanging against the Clift With-
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