Where the descent from this eminence reaches an intermediate level, preparatory to diving again downwards, the road takes a curve through the park-lands of Kingston House, a stately but cold-looking mansion of stone, figuring in that first novel, Desperate Remedies, as “Knapwater House.” The bias of the architect, as he then was, is prominently displayed in Mr. Hardy’s description of it: “The house was regularly and substantially built of clean grey freestone throughout, in that plainer fashion of Greek classicism which prevailed at the latter end of the last century, when the copyists called designers had grown weary of fantastic variations in the Roman orders. The main block approximated to a square on the ground plan, having a projection in the centre of each side, surmounted by a pediment. From each angle of the north side ran a line of buildings lower than the rest, turning inwards again at their farthest end, and forming within them a spacious open court, within which resounded an echo of astounding clearness. These erections were in their turn backed by ivy-covered ice-houses, laundries, and stables, the whole mass of subsidiary buildings being half buried beneath close-set shrubs and trees.”
Leaving aside, for the present, an exploration of Stinsford, down the next turning, to come later to a particular and intimate discussion of it, we proceed to Dorchester, whose houses, and those of its allied suburb of Fordington, are now seen, crowning the ridge on which the old county town stands.
CHAPTER VII
DORCHESTER
Dorchester, the “Casterbridge” of the novels, stands upon or, more correctly, above, the River Frome, and from that circumstance derived its ancient Roman name of Durnovaria, whose Latinity Mr. Hardy has exploited in the name of “Durnover” he confers upon Fordington. The Romans themselves did by no means invent their name for the station they founded here, but just adapted the title given by the native tribe of Durotriges to their settlement. Those natives, who were of Welsh stock, styled their habitation by the sufficiently Welsh name of Dwrinwyr, which, like all Cymric place-names, was descriptive and alluded to its watery situation.
The approach to Dorchester has suffered in late years, in the pictorial point of view, from the decay and destruction of many of those magnificent old elms that once formed a noble introduction along this, the “London Road”; but it is not wholly to be bankrupted of beauty, for, although Dorchester may continue to grow, it is not in this direction that its suburbs will be thrown out. The flat water-meadows of the Frome forbid building operations here, and in effect say, at the bridge immediately below where Fordington on its ridge stands on the thitherward bank of the stream—“thus far and no farther!” From this approach, looking to where Fordington’s houses die away on the left hand, and to where the chalky downs begin to rise, you may obtain a distant view of the novelist’s residence, a house he himself designed, standing beside the Wareham Road near where an old turnpike-gate stood, and called from it “Max Gate.” Looking, however, straight ahead, the road into Dorchester is seen becoming a street and going with inflexible Roman directness through the town, with the ancient church tower of Fordington slightly to the left, and the equally ancient church of St. Peter’s immediately in front, in the centre of the town, where the two main streets cross. Attendant modern churches and chapels, and the Town Hall, with spires, act as satellites. To the right hand, rising bulky from the huddled mass of houses, is a grey building which but a little experience of touring in England identifies without need of inquiry as the gaol.
Dorchester, figuring as the “Casterbridge” of that mayor whose surprising history is set forth in that powerful story, bulks large in the whole series of Wessex novels—as how could it fail of doing, seeing that the novelist himself was born at Upper Bockhampton, only three miles away? In masterly fashion he has described its salient points, as they were before modernity had come to obliterate them, or at least to take off the sharp edge of their singularity. He has expended much thought upon Roman Dorchester, and speculated upon what manner of place it was fifteen hundred years ago. “Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street, alley, and precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed dead men of Rome. It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier or other of the Empire, who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest for a space of fifteen hundred years.” Nay, even within the precincts of his own garden, on the edge of the rotund upland that looks so wanly down upon the railway, relics of the legionaries have been discovered. Three of those stout warriors were there found. “Each body was fitted with, one may almost say, perfect accuracy into the oval hole, the crown of the head touching the maiden chalk at one end and the toes at the other, the tight-fitting situation being strongly suggestive of the chicken in the egg-shell.”
More attuned to modern times is that description of Dorchester as it appeared when Susan, Henchard’s wife, with Elizabeth-Jane, entered it from the London Road that evening. Wonderfully observed and true is that passage where the light of the street lamps, glimmering through those engirdling trees that were then, even more than now, the great feature of the town, is made a snug and comforting contrast with the outside country, seeming “strangely solitary and vacant in aspect, considering its nearness to life.” Then the agricultural and pastoral pursuits of the people, as reflected in the character of the goods displayed in shop windows, is neatly shown, in a list of those objects: the hay-rakes, the seed-lips, butter-firkins, hoes and spades and mattocks; the horse-embrocations, scythes, reaping-hooks, and hedger’s and ditcher’s gloves, articles all of everyday requirement.
The “grizzled church” to which they came was St. Peter’s, whose tower showed “how completely the mortar from the joints of the stonework had been nibbled out by time and weather, which had planted in the crevices thus made little tufts of stone-crop and grass, almost as far up as the very battlements.” Yes, and so one vividly remembers it; but restoration has recently made away with all these evidences of age, and cleaned the stonework and renewed and pointed it, greatly to the aid of the tower’s structural stability, ’tis true, but the very death of picturesque effect. There is a pleasing thing here, at the foot of this tower, where High East Street and High West Street join. It is the bronze life-sized statue, in his habit as he lived, of “Pa’son Barnes,” otherwise the Reverend William Barnes, the Dorset poet, described by Thomas Hardy as he is represented here—“an aged clergyman, quaintly attired in caped cloak, knee-breeches and buckled shoes, with a leather satchel slung over his shoulders and a stout staff in his hand.” This quaint figure, whose life and thoughts and writings were racy of the soil whence he sprang—he was born in the Vale of Blackmore—was for many years a quite inadequately rewarded schoolmaster, and only late in life was given, first the living of Whitcomb, and then that of Winterborne Came, near Dorchester. His poems in the Dorsetshire vernacular, long known and admired, were not pecuniarily successful. “What a mockery is life!” said he. “They praise me, and take away my bread! They may be putting up a statue to me some day, when I am dead, while all I want now is leave to live. I asked for bread, and they gave me a stone!”
Prophetic indeed! for here is the statue, with beneath it the inscription: