Thomas Hardy was a country man who spent nearly all his life in the environs of his native Dorchester. And even up to the time he died, 71 years ago today, on January 11th, 1928, it was a very peaceful spot. "Five decades hardly modified the cut of a gaiter or the embroidery of a smock-frock by the breadth of a hair. Ten generations failed to alter the turn of a single phrase."
And as for the landscape, "the heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was very clearly marked".
Perhaps as a consequence of this very evident contiguity between land and sky, Hardy was very familiar with the weather's changing moods, and with the many signs that were said by country folk to indicate a turning for the worse. In Far from the Madding Crowd he uses them to good effect.
"In the sky," he tells us, about what was to be an eventful autumn evening, "dashes of buoyant cloud were sailing in a course at right angles to that of another stratum, neither of them in the direction of the breeze below. The same evening the sheep had trailed homeward head to tail, the rooks had been confused, and the horses had moved with timidity and caution. Now the sheep were crowded close together, all grouped in such a way that their tails, without exception, were towards the half of the horizon from which the storm threatened.
"Gabriel Oak proceeded towards his house. In approaching the door his toe kicked against something which felt soft, leathery and distended, like a boxing glove. It was a large toad, humbly travelling across the path. He knew what this direct message from the Great Mother meant."
Soon he saw yet another sign. "When he struck a light indoors there appeared upon the table a thin glistening streak, as if a brush of varnish had been lightly dragged across it. Oak's eyes followed the serpentine sheen to the other side, where it led up to a huge brown garden slug which had come indoors tonight for reasons of its own."
And later: "Two black spiders of the kind common in thatched houses promenaded the ceiling, ultimately dropping to the floor."
The meaning of these diverse happenings was clear: "There was to be a thunderstorm, and afterwards, a cold continuous rain. The creeping things seemed to know all about the later rain, but little of the interpolating thunderstorm, whilst the sheep knew all about the thunderstorm and nothing of the later rain."