He is usually thought to be at his best in descriptions of farmers, village mechanics, laborers, dairymen, men who kill pigs, tend sheep, furze-cutters, masons, hostlers, loafers who do nothing in particular, and while thus occupied rail on Lady Fortune in good set terms. Certainly he paints these people with affectionate fidelity. Their virile, racy talk delights him. His reproductions of that talk are often intensely realistic. Nearly every book has its chorus of human grotesques whose mere names are a source of mirth. William Worm, Grandfer Cantle, ‘Corp’el’ Tullidge, Christopher Coney, John Upjohn, Robert Creedle, Martin Cannister, Haymoss Fry, Robert Lickpan, and Sammy Blore,—men so denominated should stand for comic things, and these men do. William Worm, for example, was deaf. His deafness took an unusual form; he heard fish frying in his head, and he was not reticent upon the subject of his infirmity. He usually described himself by the epithet ‘wambling,’ and protested that he would never pay the Lord for his making,—a degree of self-knowledge which many have arrived at but few have the courage to confess. He was once observed in the act of making himself ‘passing civil and friendly by overspreading his face with a large smile that seemed to have no connection with the humor he was in.’ Sympathy because of his deafness elicited this response: ‘Ay, I assure you that frying o’ fish is going on for nights and days. And, you know, sometimes ’tisn’t only fish, but rashers o’ bacon and inions. Ay, I can hear the fat pop and fizz as nateral as life.’
He was questioned as to what means of cure he had tried.
‘Oh, ay bless ye, I’ve tried everything. Ay, Providence is a merciful man, and I have hoped he’d have found it out by this time, living so many years in a parson’s family, too, as I have; but ’a don’t seem to relieve me. Ay, I be a poor wambling man, and life’s a mint o’ trouble.’
One knows not which to admire the more, the appetizing realism in William Worm’s account of his infirmity, or the primitive state of his theological views which allowed him to look for special divine favor by virtue of the ecclesiastical conspicuousness of his late residence.
Hardy must have heard, with comfort in the thought of its literary possibilities, the following dialogue on the cleverness of women. It occurs in the last chapter of The Woodlanders. A man who is always spoken of as the ‘hollow-turner,’ a phrase obviously descriptive of his line of business, which related to wooden bowls, spigots, cheese-vats, and funnels, talks with John Upjohn.
‘What women do know nowadays!’ he says. ‘You can’t deceive ’em as you could in my time.’
‘What they knowed then was not small,’ said John Upjohn. ‘Always a good deal more than the men! Why, when I went courting my wife that is now, the skillfulness that she would show in keeping me on her pretty side as she walked was beyond all belief. Perhaps you’ve noticed that she’s got a pretty side to her face as well as a plain one?’
‘I can’t say I’ve noticed it particular much,’ said the hollow-turner blandly.
‘Well,’ continued Upjohn, not disconcerted, ‘she has. All women under the sun be prettier one side than t’other. And, as I was saying, the pains she would take to make me walk on the pretty side were unending. I warrent that whether we were going with the sun or against the sun, uphill or downhill, in wind or in lewth, that wart of hers was always toward the hedge, and that dimple toward me. There was I too simple to see her wheelings and turnings; and she so artful though two years younger, that she could lead me with a cotton thread like a blind ham; … no, I don’t think the women have got cleverer, for they was never otherwise.’