Hardy's Wessex [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONEThe Origin of WessexIn his old age Thomas Hardy entered in one of his notebooks a thought which plainly reflected his own experience 'I am convinced that it is better for a writer to know a little bit of the world remarkably well than to know a great part of the world remarkably little'. The dry sententious manner and the balanced symmetry of the construction do not conceal the inner personal strength of his ties with the West Country, where he was born and spent the greater part of his life. Wessex as we know it today is his creation. It is the little bit of the world that he knew remarkably well. Something of Hardy's own self speaks in the voice of Grace Melbury in The Woodlanders when she says, 'I love dear old Hintock, and the people in it, fifty times better than all the Continent!'Nonetheless Hardy well understood the limitations of provincial life. In his first published novel. Desperate Remedies, he commented, 'Provincial towns trying to be lively are the dullest of dull things'. He himself might in the end be described as a regional man but not a provincial one. He prided himself on being as much at ease in London as in Dorchester. Indeed the love-hate relationship between Wessex and the metropolis was a factor of constant relevance and intensity in Hardy's creative life. He was of that first generation of ambitious young men to whom the railway offered an escape from the rural obscurity of Dorset to the stimulation, the wide intellectual horizon, of the capital city. The two contrasting modes of feeling - for his native soil and for his cultural Mecca entwine, sometimes fusing, sometimes pulling asunder, always with varying degrees of emphasis and never finally resolved. In the complexity of his genius this tension is a primary factor.