Away across the Frome is the rustic, out-of-the-way village of West Stafford, which has a little one-aisled church, still displaying the royal arms of the time of Queen Elizabeth with that semée of lilies, the empty boast of a sovereignty over France, which, to the contemplative and sentimental student of history is as pitiful a make-believe as that of penury apeing affluence. “That glorious Semper Eadem,” motto, “our banner and our pride,” as Macaulay says, looks a little flatulent in these circumstances of a relaxed grasp.
The long rhymed inscription outside an off-licence beerhouse in the village, displaying the Hardyean phrase of “a cup of genuine” for a glass of ale, is a curiosity in its way—
I trust no Wise Man will condemn
A Cup of Genuine now and then.
When you are faint, your spirits low,
Your string relaxed ’twill bend your Bow,
Brace your Drumhead and make you tight,
Wind up your Watch and set you right:
But then again the too much use
Of all strong liquors is the abuse.
’Tis liquid makes the solid loose,
The Texture and whole frame Destroys,
But health lies in the Equipoise.
Resuming the north bank of the Frome, and the road to Tincleton, a left-hand turning is seen leading across to Piddletown, by way of Lower and Upper Bockhampton—hamlets rustic to the last degree, and, by reason of being quite remote from any road the casual stranger is likely to take, unknown to the outside world. Yet the second of these, the thatched and tree-embowered hamlet of Upper Bockhampton, has the keenest interest for the explorer of the Hardy Country, for it was here, in the rustic, thatched cottage still occupied by members of the Hardy family, that Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet, was born, June 2nd, 1840. It is a fitting spot for the birthplace of one who has described nature as surely it has never before been described, has pictured the moods of earth and sky, and has heard and given new significances to the voices of birds and trees, by the stubborn and intractable method of prose-writing.
The cottage stands—its front almost hid from sight in the dense growths of its old garden and by the slope of the downs—at the extreme upper end of Upper Bockhampton, on the edge of the wild, called, with a fine freedom of choice, Bockhampton or Piddletown Heath, and Thorneycombe or Ilsington Woods. You enter its garden up steep, rustic steps, and find its low-ceiled rooms stone-flagged and criss-crossed with beams. At the back, its walls, with small latticed windows, look sheer upon a lane leading into the heart of the woodland; where, so little are strangers expected or desired that the tree-trunks bear notice-boards detailing what shall be done to those who trespass. Branches of these enshrining trees touch the thatched roof and scrape the walls, and the voices of the wind and of the woodlands reverberate from them; and when the sun goes down, the nocturnal orchestra of owls and nightingales strikes up. It is an ideal spot for the birth of one whose genius and bent are largely in the interpretation of nature; but it must not be forgotten that the chances are always against the observation and appreciation of scenes amidst which a child has been born and reared, and that only exceptional receptivity can throw off the usual effect of staleness and lack of interest in things usual and accustomed. It is thus in the nature of things that the townsman generally takes a keener interest in the country than those native to it, and the dweller in the mushroom cities of commerce finds more in a cathedral city than many of those living within the shadow of the Minster ever suspect. This is to say, parabolically, what we all know, that the nature of the seer is an exceptional nature, and rises superior to the dulling effects of use and wont: unaccountable as the winds that blow, and not to be analysed or predicated by any literary meteorological department.
Returning through Lower Bockhampton, on the way to Tincleton, a ridge is presently seen on the left hand, crowned with fir-trees, and a little questing will reveal a rush-grown pool, the original of Heedless William’s Pond, mentioned in The Fiddler of the Reels. Beyond this landmark, a cottage that fills the position of “Bloom’s End” in The Return of the Native, is seen, and on the right-hand side the farmstead of Norris Mill Farm, where, overlooking the Vale of Great Dairies, is the original of Talbothays, the dairy where Angel Clare, learning the business from Dairyman Crick, met Tess. Below the grassy bluff on whose sides the farm-buildings stand may be traced the fertilising course of the Frome, or as Mr. Hardy calls it, the Var:—“The Var waters were clear as the pure River of Life shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with pebbly shadows that prattled to the sky all day long. There the water-flower was the lily.”
This land of fat kine and water-meads, to the south of the road, is neighboured to the northward by the outlying brown and purple stretches of Egdon Heath, into whose wilds we shall presently come. “Bloom’s End,” or a house that may well stand for it, we have noticed, and now come upon a humble little farm on the right hand, standing with front to the road and facing upon a strikingly gloomy heather-covered hill. This is the house, once the “Duck” inn, which figures in The Return of the Native as the “Quiet Woman” inn, kept by Damon Wildeve, who, a failure as an engineer, made a worse shipwreck of life here. As described in the novel, a little patch of land has by dint of supreme exertions been reclaimed from the grudging soil: