So, with out additional dialogue, I’ll start with a take a look at a melancholy little episode from the pen of Thomas Hardy…
When you had been passing by way of a coastal city in Southern England within the Eighteen Nineties, maybe leaving your condo (hopefully not a semi-detached) in London’s West Finish to go to a cousin in Plymouth, you may need heard this story when the coach stopped to vary horses. Hardy creates a world that’s nice and relatable, and we really feel like we all know the residents and the customs in addition to the creaky turnstiles and breezy hedgerows after just a few pages. All of this makes its somber topic all of the extra tragic.
A gaggle of passengers are travelling in a cart one summer season day when two of them – the gloomy father of a seed salesman and a sure Mr. Lackland – start discussing the loss of life of a mutual acquaintance named William. The seedsman’s father remarks that there was “one thing very unusual” about his loss of life, and Lackland asks him to elaborate.
William, he remembers, was a quiet man, however he was at all times a bit “unusual,” and appeared to exude an otherworldly power: “you might really feel when he got here close to ‘ee; and if he was in the home or wherever behind you with out your seeing him, there appeared to be one thing clammy within the air, as if a cellar door opened shut by your elbow.”
The deadly ”strangeness,” nonetheless, all started one Sunday whereas he was nonetheless very wholesome. The sexton was ringing the church bell when it immediately turned unaccountably heavy, requiring him to work a lot tougher to toll it. The sources of the strain was by no means uncovered, and this struck the locals as one thing of a foul omen, as if loss of life had been on its method.
Later that very same week, whereas William was asleep in mattress and his spouse was up late doing house responsibilities, she heard him rise from the bed room, stroll down the steps, put his boots on, and stroll out into the evening. Each spouses had been quiet by nature, and neither exchanged a phrase, as she assumed that he was going to clear his head or smoke a pipe.
She continued her work, however started to develop involved when hours had handed and he nonetheless hadn’t returned. Nevertheless, she was exhausted, so she left the door unlocked and went to mattress, the place – to her horror – she discovered him sleeping, and his boots nonetheless on the ground. There was just one staircase, so there was no likelihood that he had come again one other method, however since they each wanted relaxation, she let him sleep.
One of many many superstitions tied to this vacation states that – at midnight on Midsummer Evening – it’s mentioned which you could see ghostly types of all of the locals who will “be at loss of life’s door inside the yr” coming into the parish church. Those that will recuperate are later seen rising from the church, however those that will succumb by no means exit. The villager explains that she and a few others took up the custom of watching the church door that evening, and says that they had been frightened as a result of William got here in the direction of them from the gloom.
At first the opposite villager appears to assume that William was taking part in a prank on them, however finally each girls understand that it should have been his spirit. His spouse infers from the opposite girl’s sudden seriousness that the phantom did not return from the church, however declines to press the matter. Her husband, she realizes, will die someday within the coming yr. However the blow is nearer than she suspects…
Three days later, Silent William was mowing a meadow within the June warmth and determined to take his lunch break below the shade of a big tree. He and his companion, John, fell asleep there, however when John awakened, he was repulsed to see a big white moth – a miller’s moth – crawling out of William’s open mouth and fly into the space. John instantly remembered that William had labored at a miller’s throughout his boyhood. Desirous to share this bizarre coincidence, he tried to shake William awake, however was horrified to seek out the person freshly lifeless from heatstroke.
That very same hour, two miles away, a person named Philip was filling a pitcher of water on the native spring when he noticed William – “trying very pale and outdated” – approaching the effectively. It shocked him as a result of he knew that William’s solely little one had drowned there some years in the past, and that “this had so preyed upon William’s thoughts that he’d by no means been seen close to the spring afterwards, and had been recognized to go half a mile out of his method to keep away from the place.” When he was instructed of William’s loss of life, Philip’s story added to the rising village lore of William’s quiet life and ill-omened demise…
After a protracted, unhappy pause, Lackland observes that it’s “a relatively melancholy story,” and the seedman’s father laconically replies “sure, sure. Effectively, we should take ups and downs collectively.”
Thomas Hardy doesn’t terrify or revolt us; his story is heavy and sullen with pathos. Relatively than portraying the conquest of human company over ghostly machinations, Hardy delves into the solemn smothering of a person by supernatural provenance, with out both resistance or objection. Shuffling by way of a quiet life, William is snuffed unceremoniously, and his non secular reflection is seen shambling by the effectively that swallowed his son. Human life, Hardy presents, is a sluggish, ambling, however usually abbreviated, trailing off into time with out theatrics like a streak of soot above an extinguished fireplace.
The story treats working class folklore and other people with light respect with out changing into wholly sentimental. That is in step with Hardy’s populist ethos and constant together with his metaphysical philosophy, which occupied a center floor between rural England’s superstitious people beliefs and West London’s posh, elitist materialism.
In Thomas Hardy and the People Horror Custom, Alan G. Smith remarks that: “Hardy’s ‘achievement’ as an artist was to stay open to each purpose and unreason, perception and disbelief, Gods and gods, the magical and the mundane. He will be discovered responding to the lack of a single over-riding spiritual meta-narrative with a rehabilitated paganism which imbues the panorama with its personal inherent that means. As Charles Taylor says: ‘In face of the opposition between orthodox and unbelief, many, and amongst them the most effective and most delicate minds, had been cross-pressured, in search of a 3rd method’ … Hardy was of this quantity. Hardy embodies most of the complexities of the fashionable thoughts.”
With out essentially verifying the superstitious man’s ghostly report, Hardy in the end sides together with his parting reflection – the stoic remark that “we should take ups and downs collectively.” Life, he exhibits us, is merciless and mysterious, and if we selected to seek out some type of that means in it, chances are high that even the that means shall be darkened by the tragedy of the human expertise, for – even when William’s loss of life is proven to have been a part of some type of divine future – it brings little consolation, and all we’re left with is “a relatively melancholy story” – a becoming description of life itself, Hardy appears to say.
