Thomas Hardy grows on you. The Woodlanders can be read and re-read. Take this vignette. `I knowed a woman, and the husband o' her went away for four-and-twenty year (said the bark-ripper). And one night he came home when she was sitting by the fire, and thereupon he sat himself on the other side of the chimney-corner. "Well," says she, have ye got any news?" "Don't know as I have," says he; "have you?" "No" says she "except that my daughter by the husband that succeeded 'ee was married last month, which was a year after I was made a widow by him." "Oh. Anything else-" he says. "No" says she. And there they sat, one on each side of that chimney-piece, and were found by the neighbours sound asleep in their chairs, not having known what to talk about.'
And from the same novel `But this deceiving of folks is nothing unusual in matrimony,' said Farmer Cawtree. `I know'd a man and wife - faith, I don't mind owning, as there's no strangers here, that the pair were my own relations - they'd be at it that hot one hour that you'd hear the poker, and the tongs, and the bellows, and the warming pan, flee across the house with the movements of their vengeance; and the next hour you'd hear 'em singing "The Spotted Cow" together, as peacable as two holy twins; yes - and very good voices they had, and would strike in like street ballet-singers to one another's support in the high notes.'
And his poetry touches deep feelings. There is the short poem `Heredity'. I am the family face; / Flesh perishes, I live on, / Projecting trait and trace / Through time to times anon, / And leaping from place to place / Over oblivion. He ends the second verse with The eternal thing in man / That heeds no call to die.
Who indeed hasn't seen in a child's face, the features of a grandparent long gone? And more, has glimpsed a gesture or movement of the same ancestor whom the child never knew? Y