“Originally the mask had exhibited a comic leer, as could still be discerned; but generations of Casterbridge boys had thrown stones at the mask, aiming at its open mouth; and the blows thereof had chipped off the lips and jaws as if they had been eaten away by disease.” Its appearance is indeed of a ghastly leprous nature, infinitely shuddery.
At this end of the town, out upon the Charminster road is the great Roman encampment of Poundbury, or, locally, “Pummery,” where Henchard spread that feast, deserted by those for whom it was intended, in favour of the rival entertainment in the West Walks, prepared by the hateful Farfrae, that paragon of all the business and higher virtues, whom the reader perversely, but not unnaturally, detests. “Roman” it has been in this last passage declared, but, in truth, its origin has been as widely disputed as that of Weatherbury Castle, where the varying theories arouse Mr. Hardy’s sarcasm so markedly. It lies without the site of the Roman walls of Durnovaria, and probably formed some advanced outpost or great camp in the long years of the Roman occupation of Britain, before the establishment of security and the growth of their towns. Those Roman walls are now for the most part gone and their sites were long ago planted with avenues, now growing aged and past their prime, and ceased to be that clean-cut barrier between urbs and rure they formed of old, when Dorchester of pre-railway days had not grown too big for that girdle the Romans had set about her: a girdle not too constrictive for the needs of the Middle Age, nor even in the eighteenth century with any suspicion of tight-lacing, but all too compressive soon after the coaches had given way to trains, and steel rails and steam along them had sent up the birthrate. A notable passage in The Mayor of Casterbridge tells how there were not, quite a little while ago, any suburbs here, in the modern sense, nor any gradual fusion of town and country. “The farmer’s boy could sit under his barleymow, and pitch a stone into the window of the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a sheep stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of ‘Baa,’ that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by.”
But those bounds have in several places been leaped, and, in especial where the South Walk runs, modern villas have redly replaced the golden grain or the green pastures. Changed manners and customs have brought about this alteration, quite as much as increased population. The four old traditional streets of the town, together with their more immediate offshoots, have been resigned more exclusively to business than of yore, and made less a residence. The butchers, the bakers, the candlestick-makers, who would once have scorned to live anywhere else than over “the shop,” will now not very often condescend to make their homes in the upper stages of their “stores” or “establishments,” or by what other pretty names modern finesse elects to describe shops and counters and tills and such like things by which tradespeople become rich.
And, by that same token, the business premises thus deserted for snug suburban villas, are themselves changing. One could never, in modern times, have strictly called Dorchester generally picturesque, in the prominent circumstances of those four main streets: repeated conflagrations that destroyed most of the really old and interesting houses forbade that, and replaced thatch and barge-boarded gables with plain brick fronts, severe in unornamental rectangular windows, and ending on the skyline with unimaginative straight copings. But the latest manifestations of these times, when they say business is a struggle and all trades alike carried on less for the profit of the purveyor, than for the good of the purchaser, are expensive carved stone and brick frontages, with good artistic features. As art in this country only spells much expenditure of good money and as building operations are always costly, it is a little difficult to square all these developments with the talk of “hard times.” South Street, in especial, is being grandly transformed, and “Napper’s Mite,” the crouching row of almshouses, built from the benefaction of the good Sir Robert Napper, in 1615, made to look additionally humble by newly risen tall buildings. But the town authorities have not yet removed the old rusticated stone obelisk that stands in Cornhill, in the centre of the town, where High East and High West Streets, and North and South Streets meet. It serves the multum-in-parvo purposes of a pump, a lamp-standard, and a leaning-stock for Dorchester’s weary or born-tired, and is moreover a landmark. But the two dumpy little houses at the corner, which were properly dumpy and humble and—so to speak—knew their place, and abased themselves in the presence of their betters—that is to say, in the contiguity of St. Peter’s across the road—have been rebuilt, with the result that their tall upstanding pretentiousness detracts not a little from the height of that “grizzled tower.”
And so, turning to the left at this corner, we leave Dorchester for Bridport, along High West Street, the quietest of all these thoroughfares, and looking rather “out of it,” and somewhat glad of that fact, in a dignified, exclusive way, typified by its aristocratic old houses, and its old County Hall. It is true there are a few shops in High Street, but they are by no means pushful shops. They never make “alarming sacrifices,” nor sell off. Indeed, were I not fearful of offending susceptibility, I might declare a belief that they never sell anything at all, and are kept by “grown-ups,” not grown tired of playing at shops when they did so arrive at years supposed to be those of discretion. Here is a quiet shop—where they will doubtless sell you something, if you really enter and firmly insist upon it—occupying one of the few really old and picturesque houses in the main thoroughfare; it is the house “by tradition” occupied by the infamous Judge Jeffreys, when visiting Dorchester on the business of that special occasion, the Bloody Assize, holden to try the unhappy wretches arraigned for their part in Monmouth’s Rebellion of 1685. The old house bears an inscription to this effect. Over three hundred prisoners faced the judge at that awful time, and two hundred and ninety received sentence of death. Of these the number actually executed was seventy-four, and, as the old gossip at the “Three Mariners” tells, portions of their bodies were gibbeted in various parts of the county, “different j’ints sent about the country like butcher’s meat.”
And so we leave Dorchester and its, on the whole, grim memories, along an avenue, fellow to that by which the town was entered.
CHAPTER IX
SWANAGE
The name of Swanage shares with that of Swansea, the honour of being, perhaps, the most poetic that any seaside resort ever owned. It is a corruption of the Danish name of “Swanic,” or “Swanwich,” and there seems to be no reason to doubt—although there exists a school of antiquarians sceptical enough to doubt it—that the place was then, as its name indicates, a place of swans. Your modern antiquary, disgusted at the childish legends once everywhere accepted as sober historical facts, rushes to the other extreme, and, although a thing be obvious, will not allow its obviousness, unless supported by documentary or other tangible evidence. He must needs disregard the self-evident, and delve deeply and unavailingly in attempts to prove that “things are not what they seem.”