From: Patrick Mulcahey <mulcahey@pacbell.net>

To: "'hardycor@owl.csusm.edu'" <hardycor@owl.csusm.edu>

Subject: Hardy and travel -- one more

Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2003 14:13:55 -0800

 

Looking through THE WOODLANDERS last night, I was struck by a passage that seemed to belong to this topic. Fitzpiers, the doctor, decided to relocate to Little Hintock, for the sort of career reasons that drew Smith, St Cleeve and Clare away (and mostly out of the reader's view):

 

"Winter in a solitary house in the country, without society, is tolerable, nay even enjoyable and delightful, given certain conditions; but these are not the conditions which attach to the life of a professional man who drops down into such a place by mere accident. They were present to the lives of Winterborne, Melbury, and Grace; but not to the doctor's. They are old association -- an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate and inanimate, within the observer's horizon. He must know all about those invisible ones of the days gone by whose feet have traversed the fields which look so grey from his windows; recall whose creaking plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands planted the trees that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose horses and hounds have torn through that underwood; what birds affect that particular brake; what bygone domestic dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, or disappointment, have been enacted in the cottages, the mansion, the street or on the green. The spot may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience; but if it lack memories it will ultimately pall upon him who settles there without opportunity of intercourse with his kind." (Chapter XVII)

 

No definitive statement about travel, of course, or even about traveling to make one's fortune. But something like the notion that without memory there can be no understanding of a place is what leads me to think that Hardy must have viewed sightseeing and adventure as trifling activities, in the scheme of things, contributing little to one's own happiness.