At the Railway Station, Upway

Thomas Hardy

"There is not much that I can do,
For I've no money that's quite my own!"
Spoke up the pitying child –
A little boy with a violin
At the station before the train came in, -
"But I can play my fiddle to you,
And a nice one 'tis, and good in tone!"


The man in the handcuffs smiled;
The constable looked, and he smiled, too,
As the fiddle began to twang;
And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang
Uproariously:
"This life so free
Is the thing for me!"
And the constable smiled, and said no word,
As if unconscious of what he heard;
And so they went on till the train came in –
The convict, and boy with the violin.

The tragedy of Hardy

My mother-in-law used to work in Eastwood, the birthplace of D.H. Lawrence. During the early part of her working life, she encountered a few elderly Eastwood residents who had known Lawrence and the Lawrence family and didn’t think much of the man behind the novels. Apparently he wasn't highly regarded locally.

In this D.H. Lawrence quote, he writes about Thomas Hardy and what he calls the tragedy of Hardy. Yet this is also the tragedy of Lawrence, his inability to inhabit the security of established convention and perhaps his failure to find beyond it what he hoped to find. 

This is the tragedy of Hardy, always the same: the tragedy of those who, more or less pioneers, have died in the wilderness, whither they had escaped for free action, after having left the walled security, and the comparative imprisonment, of the established convention. This is the theme of novel after novel: remain quite within the convention, and you are good, safe, and happy in the long run, though you never have the vivid pang of sympathy on your side: or, on the other hand, be passionate, individual, wilful, you will find the security of the convention a walled prison, you will escape, and you will die, either of your own lack of strength to bear the isolation and the exposure, or by direct revenge from the community, or from both.

D.H. Lawrence - Study of Thomas Hardy (1914)

The Duke

Fear seized upon the shepherd-boy: the Duke was Jove himself to the rural population, whom to offend was starvation, homelessness, and death, and whom to look at was to be mentally scathed and dumbfounded. 

Thomas Hardy – What The Shepherd Saw (1913)

Hardy’s story has a shepherd boy alone at night in the shepherd’s hut keeping watch on the sheep. From the hut window he sees the Duke in the moonlight and his immediate reaction is to stay out of sight. Nothing good can come of making himself known to such a powerful aristocrat in mysterious circumstances.

This is one of those quotes which stayed with me for years, an insight into a grim reality of agricultural life not so long ago. There is something distinctly criminal about such a level of personal power over other people. Hardy’s Duke is not so far removed from a gangland boss living a life of surface respectability when everyone knows they must never cross him. Even being known to him is a risk.

Four sparrows and a thrush

He softly let himself out, and was gone some time. When he reappeared, he produced, not a rabbit, but four sparrows and a thrush. ‘I could do nothing in the way of a rabbit without setting a wire,’ he said. ‘But I have managed to get these by knowing where they roost.’ He showed her how to prepare the birds, and, having set her to roast them by the fire, departed with the pitcher, to replenish it at the brook which flowed near the homestead in the neighbouring Bottom.

Thomas Hardy - Two on a Tower (1882)

Times change. I would have no idea how to find a meal like that, nor how to cook it. Yet as a youngster I remember a great-uncle telling us about his childhood and how his family used to catch and eat sparrows. The times he was speaking of would only be a few years after Hardy published his novel.

We have lots of sparrows in the garden this year but I’m not tempted.

Happy New Year

source

Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more prevailed in being unhampered by conventional restrictions. Absolute confidence in each other’s good opinion begat perfect ease, while the finishing stroke of manner, amounting to a truly princely serenity, was lent to the majority by the absence of any expression or trait denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge their minds, or do any eclipsing thing whatever — which nowadays so generally nips the bloom and bonhomie of all except the two extremes of the social scale.

Thomas Hardy - The Three Strangers (1883)

Things change

source

Timepieces

I presume I shall be better understood if I day that the month was October and the day October thirteenth; the exact hour I cannot tell you — it’s easier to get philosophers to agree than timepieces — but it was between noon and one o’clock.

Seneca - Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii (around 55AD)

Tanning

A terrific day when the doctor, with face tanned like a chauffeur’s, returned to Clerkenwell and resumed his work, calm, prim, impassible as ever!

Arnold Bennett - Elsie and the Child (1924)

Childhood nutrition

He listens; ay, his lips moving perhaps, and a smile on his old face like a child asking for a slice of bread and sugar.

Walter de la Mare - Music (1955)

As a child I remember bread and butter with sugar sprinkled on it. Slightly crunchy and not particularly pleasant

Distance

“How long does it take to go to Westcombe across this way?” she asked of him while they were bringing up the carriage.

“About two hours,” he said.

“Two hours — so long as that, does it? How far is it away?”

“Eight miles.”

“Two hours to drive eight miles — who ever heard of such a thing!” “I thought you meant walking”

“Ah, yes; but one hardly means walking without expressly stating it.”

“Well, it seems just the other way to me — that walking is meant unless you say driving.”

Thomas Hardy - An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress (1935)

Monday mornings

Monday morning is a strenuous but somehow a glad morning in respectable households of regular habits. The clean linen is brought out in lovely white piles from the linen cupboard and distributed over the house, and the dirty linen is collected and shamefully hurried away and catalogued in a place without honour and thrown pell-mell in baskets and despatched, and then everybody has a sweet sense of relief.

Arnold Bennett - Elsie and the Child (1924)

Transport

I have just returned from a ride in my litter; and I am as weary as if I had walked the distance, instead of being seated. Even to be carried for any length of time is hard work, perhaps all the more so because it is an unnatural exercise; for Nature gave us legs with which to do our own walking, and eyes with which to do our own seeing. Our luxuries have condemned us to weakness; we have ceased to be able to do that which we have long declined to do.

Seneca - Epistulae morales ad Lucilium c. 65 AD

Raise a glass to the prophets

To my mind, one of the greatest blights on the intellectual landscape is the wannabe prophet. The guy with a pocketful of adjectives who claims intimacy with the future. The prophesy bit may well be buried under a few layers of technical froth, but it’s usually visible to those who take the trouble to look.

Frustratingly you can’t check everything emitted by pseudo prophets because links are absent or not quite relevant or there are just too many to check. These latter prophets seem to hypnotise their acolytes into a kind of stunned acquiescence. The prophet squirts out a morass of comfy cant which moulds itself tightly around acolyte prejudices. It’s like watching a snake snacking on a kid’s hamster.

When tackling the prophet issue I find it’s a good idea to stick to two key mantras as a protective armour against becoming hopelessly lost in their rhetoric.

Mantra 1 – the future is unknown and unknowable. There are a few clues and regularities but these are mostly common knowledge available to all. Such as night following day.

Mantra 2 – prophets have been with us forever. They are a feature of the landscape like rocks, trees and babbling brooks. Some of their guesses are bound to come good through sheer breadth of coverage, but in those rare cases I just pause for a moment and remember those monkeys typing out Shakespeare’s plays.

There are exceptions of course. Some writers such as G K Chesterton have been remarkably prescient about social and political change simply because he was an adept people-watcher and a profound sceptic when it came to novel social enthusiasms.

So who are the prophets these days? Well they swarm through the environment, economics and politics like locusts. Too many to count. Their numbers are so vast because it’s a popular pastime for the inflated ego, but there are prophets who manipulate the future too. Their prophesies come true because in a sense they make them come true. These are the guys who know how to spin desirable illusions.

If it had existed it did exist. And if it did exist, it was worth having. You could call it an illusion if you liked. But an illusion which is a real experience is worth having.

D.H. Lawrence - The Captain's Doll (1923)

The new prophets have money, lots and lots of money. Their illusions have depth, subtlety and richly persuasive narratives. They also have professionals – employees whose job it is to promote illusions, weave them into the complexities of daily life, hide their origins and their purpose from the vulgar gaze.

Prophesy has a major weakness though, its tendency toward the scare story or doom mongering. Illusion weavers seem to have an ineradicable fixation with a notion that people must be manipulated by pessimism – only rarely by optimism. Hence the scare story as the narrative vehicle of choice.

D H Lawrence, G K Chesterton and Thomas Hardy all wrote about it – how individuals, families and especially societies so often conspire against the flowering of the human spirit. How inevitable it is that free spirits be brought back to earth – sooner or later.

The guy with the placard saying Prepare To Meet Thy Doom, he’s the handy figure of fun, the butt of a thousand cartoon jokes, but he’s not the problem. Never was.

So those who sit in offices, those with digital placards destined to be woven into our lives by professionals – maybe we should treat them as figures of fun too. Maybe we should despise them and raise a sardonic glass to their antics, because in the end their manipulations are perhaps susceptible to a genial determination to get on with life and enjoy it.

Certainly, we would sacrifice all our wires, wheels, systems, specialties, physical science and frenzied finance for one half-hour of happiness such as has often come to us with comrades in a common tavern. I do not say the sacrifice will be necessary; I only say it will be easy.

G K Chesterton - What's Wrong with the World (1910)