Making the Past Wake: Anthropological Survivals in Hardy’s Poetry
I
Next this strange message Darwin brings,
(Though saying his say
In a quiet way);
We all are one with creeping things
And apes and men
Blood-brethren,
And likewise reptile forms with stings.
(‘Drinking Song’, ll. 46–52)
In Thomas Hardy’s ‘Drinking Song’ the speaker decodes Charles Darwin’s ‘strange message’ with a uniquely complex blend of philosophical gravitas and darkly mischievous wit. What triggers this speaker’s sardonic dismay is the possibility of a lineage reified in ‘blood’: a mysterious bond between ‘apes and men’ that survives ‘dull defacing Time’ (‘In the Night She Came’, l. 11). The phantasmagoric, visionary and uncanny components of Hardy’s poetry, anchored in a radical repackaging of Darwin’s scientific bequest, owes a signal though not widely canvassed debt to a late-Victorian anthropologist with a keen interest in questions of biological inheritance and ancestral memory, as well as in the ‘potential diffusion’ of consciousness and the ‘permeability’ of individual selfhood (Vrettos, 2007):
Among evidence aiding us to trace the course which the civilization of the world has actually followed, is that great class of facts to denote which I have found it convenient to introduce the term ‘survivals’. These are processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has evolved. (Tylor, 1903, I, 14–15)
So E. B. Tylor (1832–1917) expounds the doctrine of ‘survivals’ in his two-volume work of comparative ethnography Primitive Culture (1871), published a year before Hardy’s pastoral romance Under the Greenwood Tree. Tylor’s anthropological coinage encompasses those venerable instances of thought or practice that had obdurately withstood what Hardy calls ‘Time’s transforming chisel’ (‘The Revisitation’, l. 109), lingering into later religious observances, political institutions and kinship organisations, thus signifying cumulative growth and continuity between archaic and more advanced forms of civilisation. Although in his second edition of Primitive Culture Tylor explicitly divorced his thesis from the Darwinian phrasing of the evolutionary paradigm, he was clearly indebted to and profited from it. Indeed, in later life Tylor did little to dispel the charge that his modish term was borrowed from or associated with concepts of rudimentary or vestigial forms in palaeontology and biology. From the 1870s, Tylor increasingly measured the anthropological analysis of the distribution of ‘survivals’ against the geological investigation into the dispersion of fossil fragments, remarking that ‘the institutions of man are as distinctly stratified as the earth on which he lives’ (1888b, 269). Tylor likened his sustained theoretical ‘excavation’ of a cultural deposit accumulated over an immensely long period to Darwin’s ground-breaking research: ‘What this task is like, may be almost perfectly illustrated by comparing these details of culture with the species of plants and animals studied by the naturalist’ (1903, I, 15).
An entry in Hardy’s literary notebooks attests that he read Primitive Culture assiduously, and set about weaving ‘survivals’ into the imaginative fabric of his fiction (1985a, I, entry 1336). His assimilation of Tylor’s anthropological tenet is first evidenced in The Return of the Native (1878):
For mummers and mumming Eustacia had the greatest contempt. The mummers themselves were not afflicted with any such feeling for their art, though at the same time they were not enthusiastic. A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. (1986a, 122)
Hardy would have concurred with Tylor’s argument that ‘no human thought is so primitive as to have lost its bearing on our own thought, nor so ancient as to have broken its connection with our own life’ (1903, II, 452). What has received only cursory mention though is how Tylor’s detailed exposition of ‘survivals’ was paralleled in Hardy’s poetry, with its obsessions with displaced memory, the legitimacy of social norms, the elusive suggestiveness of apparitions as ‘frail as filmy gossamere’ (‘The Dawn after the Dance’, l. 20) and the status of religious institutions in ‘former days’ (‘Reminiscences of a Dancing Man’, l. 10). Contemporary peasant ‘survivals’, hitherto scorned as the worthless wreckage cast aside by progressive culture, become in Hardy’s verse an enticing archive of secrets and the object of acute ‘scientific curiosity’ (Zimmerman, 2008, 7). Hardy finds piquancy in the anachronistic assemblage of cultural residues; such illogical, nonconforming vestiges do not translate easily into a modern parlance. This challenge of imperfectly recuperated meaning imbues his archaeological fascination with dim reminders of a primal legacy tangled in mental reverie, persistent myths, proverbs, superstitions and other insular atavisms. Hardy’s ‘antique research’ (‘Her Dilemma’, l. 3) implicitly endorses Tylor’s summary of modern anthropology’s goal: ‘Civilization, being a process of long and complex growth, can only be thoroughly understood when studied through its entire range; that the past is continually needed to explain the present, and the whole to explain the part’ (1865, 2).
II
Hardy’s ambitious poetic excursions through family, parish, national and cosmic history are firmly rooted in the associative power of ‘survivals’. For example, ‘After a Journey’ renders a visit to Pentargan Bay which Hardy and Emma Gifford had savoured over four decades earlier. The poet-speaker combats ‘Time’s derision’ (l. 16) by recapturing the youthful brio of a former self which is both avowed and queried: ‘I am just the same as when / Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers’ (ll. 31–32). ‘The Two Soldiers’ disinters ‘a memory-acted scene’ (l. 23) whose limpid clarity implies that it had occurred only recently rather than all ‘those years gone by’ (l. 6). Hardy’s speakers chart how secular, mundane and quotidian antique moments play over current encounters and negotiations. ‘After the Fair’ is especially resonant in this regard:
And midnight clears High Street of all but the ghosts
Of its buried burghees,
From the latest far back to those old Roman hosts
Whose remains one yet sees,
Who loved, laughed, and fought, hailed their friends, drank their toasts
At their meeting-times here, just as these!
(ll. 19–24)
Tylor construed such ‘remains’ as idiosyncratic, dwindling and tenuous holdovers – ‘fragments of a dead lower culture’ densely embedded ‘in a living higher one’ (1903, I, 72) – telling a cheerless tale of former barbarism. By contrast, Hardy’s ‘keenest backward eye’ (‘The To-Be-Forgotten’, l. 12) seeks a vitalising presence in these physical and mental heirlooms of the shadowy past, whether they are the ‘bleak hill-graves’ of Celtic ‘Chieftains’ (‘My Cicely’, l. 31) which dominate the distant uplands around Dorchester, petrified organic remains or even philological aberrances. The emphatic, alliterated ‘buried burghees’ is itself positioned as an intriguing artefact in this verbal performance. Through the semantic accretions of ‘burghees’ the speaker adumbrates the intricate lineaments of a hybridised and stratified topography, subject to successive clearances and conquests over time: Middle English and Old French burgeis, from Late Latin burgus (fort or city). From a strictly archaeological perspective, the products of ‘old Roman’ Wessex might appear to Tylor’s acolytes as cultural backwash or ‘useless gear’ (‘After the Last Breath’, l. 12). But Hardy refuses to recognise in these ‘survivals’ only a moribund ‘language – a thing crystallized at an arbitrarily selected stage of its existence, and bidden to forget that it has a past’ (Hardy, 1999, 71). The signal weakness of Tylor’s theoretical enterprise, according to Hardy, was that its painstakingly rational procedures of minute observation, sober inference and generalisation bleached disinterred ‘finds’ and other evidential threads of any capacity to enrich the cultures of which they were once a notable part. In his ‘archaeological’ poems Hardy proposes a multifaceted interaction between a living community and the rustic hinterland, whose pre-Christian landmarks are both rendered by and essential to it. So he evokes the tumuli of ‘The Revisitation’ and ‘Evening Shadows’, or the standing stones in ‘The Shadow on the Stone’, along with their elliptical ‘biographies’ and accumulated ‘patina’ of bucolic lore (Kroll, 2009, 337). Such vestigial remnants possess more than scientific interest to Hardy. They are memorials that store the erratic force of lyric feeling, compelling his speakers to rethink their own perceptual repertoire and to assess the tenure and exact perimeters of memory.
Hardy’s poetry retools Tylor’s anthropological coinage, shifting from ‘processes, customs, opinions’ to incorporate drab domestic ephemera – ‘home-things’ (‘Her Death and After’, l. 12) and other ‘petty items’ (‘The Noble Lady’s Tale’, l. 80) of negligible monetary value which nevertheless transmit the climate of a lost locale. Hardy’s sedulous poetic rendering of these interrupted, capricious or manifold transmissions both mirrors and interrogates seminal accounts of historically determined subjectivity. William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) contends that household impedimenta ‘become, with different degrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves’ (1950, I, 292–93). Hardy measures transient human consciousness against the stolid durability of inanimate ‘articles’ which are crusted with mental traces. In Organic Memory, Laura Otis posits that for Hardy ‘history is everywhere, but it is not really in anyone or anything seen as much as in the mind of the viewer attempting to reconstruct it’ (1994, 58). This thesis greatly underestimates the extent to which faint pulses of paranormal activity come together and exist beyond the limits of ‘individual consciousness’ in Hardy’s poetry (see Vrettos, 2007). He shows that the sympathetic resonances of ‘old association’ saturate such ostensibly unglamorous artefacts as ‘The Garden Seat’, an ‘ancient floor, / Footworn […] hollowed’ (‘The Self-Unseeing’, ll. 1–2) or even ‘walls of weathered stone’ (‘Ditty’, l. 3).
Hardy’s 1887 novel The Woodlanders supplies the most incisive definition of this phenomenon:
old association [is] 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 […] 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 lacks memories it will ultimately pall upon him who settles there without opportunity of intercourse with his kind. (1985b, 95)
These humble sites and materials are no less ‘survivals’ than the mute monuments of forgotten faiths such as Stonehenge, whose comfortless grandeur is evoked in the closing pages of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). By delineating the tenacious adherence of subjective impressions to palpable artefacts, Hardy diverges from Tylor’s concept of public history (‘the course which the civilization of the world has actually followed’) into an intensely private realm of experimental rupture and ‘rapture’ (‘Her Initials’, l. 4), where direct memory exists alongside various hoary trinkets, rubble and ‘residue’ (‘The Flirt’s Tragedy’, l. 112). In so doing he qualifies the scientific notion of a ‘survival’ from an otherwise inaccessible past.
Far from showing the poetic sensibility grimly fixated on human mortality or checked by awed ignorance at what one Victorian archaeologist called the ‘great void that extends from the historical border far away into the remote geological past’ (Anon., 1872, 443), it is the essence of Hardy’s craft from the outset to exhume the ‘forms of old time’ (‘The House of Hospitalities’, l. 19) – recalibrating the psychic, lexical or concrete ‘survivals’ of history as prodigally storied and reverberant curios – and to make them play tantalisingly round the immediate object of his concern. Then he invites the reader to tease out the implications of the elaborate perspectives that result. What Samuel Hynes construes as a notable weakness of Hardy’s verse – its inability to ‘shape causal, sequential actions into poems without reduction and distortion’ (Hynes, 1995) – is actually its most innovative trait, exploiting ‘survivals’ to laud radical ‘unrestraint as to [temporal] boundaries’ (Hardy, 1986b, 61). ‘In the British Museum’, for instance, presents the shattered base of a pillar rescued – or plundered – from the Areopagus, which is devoid of inscription, betraying only ‘ashen blankness’ (l. 3). Nevertheless, from the standpoint of the ‘labouring man’ (l. 25) who speaks the second half of the poem and who stands gazing at ‘that time-touched stone’ (l. 1), the words St Paul preached at the Areopagus were ‘in all their intimate accents / Patterned upon / That marble front, and were wide reflected, / And then were gone’ (ll. 21–24). The labourer’s spellbound perception of the stone as a talisman is not dissimilar to Hardy’s poetic ruse of investing archaeological splinters and sites with the potency to relay ‘fitful gleams’ (‘To a Lady’, l. 12) and ‘lucid legend[s]’ (‘Ditty’, l. 17) from bygone generations, blending ‘pulsing life with lives long done, / Till Time seemed fiction, Past and Present one’ (‘Rome: On the Palatine’, ll. 13–14).
When Hardy embarked on a career as an apprentice architect, evidence pointing to the age of the human species was widely scattered, haphazardly arranged and wilfully misinterpreted. The Guide to the Exhibition Rooms of the British Museum, posited upon the Three-Age System, was not published until 1871, when Hardy was completing Desperate Remedies. ‘In the British Museum’ reveals not only a ‘cunning irregularity’ (Hardy, 1986c, 323) in its verbal masonry, but also a temporal sensation that is discontinuous, indeterminate and vertiginous, productively disturbing a conventional narrative’s artificial attempts at crisp linearity. Hardy shows that the numerous interlocking layers of sensory and affective experience operate as a more complex recording instrument than the geological or archaeological records epitomised by ‘earth’s testimonies’ in ‘Before Life and After’ (l. 2). ‘In the British Museum’ overrides the imperial instinct to rationalise ‘Time’ as the monitoring and mapping of a succession of simultaneously understood clock or calendar events. Perhaps the most startling facet of this poem is the insouciant ease with which Hardy not only telescopes the historical dimension in his amateur antiquarianism, but also greatly amplifies it at the other end of the spectrum, to embrace ‘Time’ as formulated by an astronomer or palaeontologist (Hynes, 1961, 10; Vrettos, 2007). This makes William Archer’s criticism of Hardy’s poetic as wanting ‘local and historical perspective in language’ all the more surprising (quoted in Taylor, 1993, 42). Hardy’s version of the stratified past approximates to a dream-like force of pleasurable intensity that dissolves the markers of possessive individualism. This ‘Time’ should be instinctually apprehended as animistic affinity, disavowing the mechanisms of controlled intellection, which may explain the poem’s blithe indifference to any organising principle of historical chronology like that epitomised by ‘the clock’s dull monotones’ in ‘Her Dilemma’ (l. 4).
A core conceit of ‘In the British Museum’ – showing the poetic imagination enabled by the fossil fragments of a lost yesterday – is given greater prominence in a cluster of Hardy’s ‘archaeological’ poems which have hitherto received scant critical scrutiny. Hardy’s poetic effort not just to unearth but also to give voice to ‘perished people’ (‘Night in the Old Home’, l. 4) is buttressed by his evocation of an expanse that was among the richest archaeological real estate in Western Europe (see Hauser, 2007, 166). ‘On an Invitation to Visit the United States’ measures the New World of reborn possibilities against a region of immanent depths: this ‘ancient’ land boasts a mnemonic topography ‘scored with prints of perished hands’ (ll. 9, 11). The ‘present’ is coded here not only as the inheritor of the ‘past’ but also as its active partner, enabling the lyric self to remodel local legacies in line with current psychic and social imperatives. Hardy foregrounds a curious paradox in these ‘archaeological’ poems: the various ‘survivals’ do not inevitably sustain or safeguard human memory, but rather contrast with – and greatly complicate – a more current human ‘remembrance’ (‘God-Forgotten’, l. 7) that supervenes upon it. To revisit the locality is also to undertake a rigorous reappraisal of the past time that is obscurely encrypted within it, evincing a complex confluence of archaic deposits and modern impulses, the remote and the recent, the endemic and the exotic. Against ‘Time’s unflinching rigour’ (‘At Castle Boterel’, l. 26), Hardy’s speakers foreground the modest victory of ‘mindsight, memory laden’ (‘To a Motherless Child’, l. 11), which discloses a marked preference for divination over diagnosis, trance over concrete specificities.
Louis MacNeice queries these associations in his poem ‘Wessex Guidebook’, published in the London Magazine in 1956. MacNeice judges Hardy’s ‘fading hand’ of a piece with the other quaint, anodyne specimens in the Dorset County Museum. Stricken by the departure of the past, Hardy is depicted here as taking an unwholesome and bizarre comfort in its mouldering relics, such as the ‘core tool’ and ‘green coins of Caracalla’. For MacNeice, Hardy is:
[…] one who chronicled a fading world;
Outside, the long roads, that the Roman ruler
Ruled himself out with, point across the land
To lasting barrows and long-vanished barracks.
(MacNeice, 1966, 452)
MacNeice’s ‘long roads’ of the ‘Roman ruler’ subtly invokes Hardy’s poem ‘The Roman Road’, published in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909), which portrays an ancient thoroughfare leading from Durnovaria (Roman Dorchester) across Puddletown (Egdon) Heath, which passed about a quarter of a mile south of Hardy’s birthplace. The track is imaged as part of an alien incursion which foists an elaborate spatial network on the unkempt profusion of a natural milieu:
The Roman Road runs straight and bare
As the pale parting-line in hair
Across the heath. And thoughtful men
Contrast its days of Now and Then,
And delve, and measure, and compare;
Visioning on the vacant air
Helmed legionaries, who proudly rear
The Eagle, as they pace again
The Roman Road.
But no tall brass-helmed legionnaire
Haunts it for me. Uprises there
A mother’s form upon my ken,
Guiding my infant steps, as when
We walked that ancient thoroughfare,
The Roman Road.
The ‘pale parting-line in hair’ exposes the skin that covers the ‘locus’ of logical thought, but the scalp is not in itself a fundamental component of the cognitive faculty (Rode, 2006, 20). So the Roman Road may give at best only a partial impression of rational restraint and civilised neatness. A ‘parting-line’ resonates with more sobering intimations of internecine strife, bitter division and the imperial rapine that was synonymous with MacNeice’s ‘Caracalla’, the competent yet increasingly paranoid and bloodthirsty military commander and emperor.
In implying that Hardy is little more than the laureate of irreversible loss, yearning for a pre-industrial terrain before it was buried invisibly beneath an unsightly crust of railways, MacNeice’s poem overlooks how ‘The Roman Road’ maps three interlocking designations of the body: the somatic (‘pale parting-line in hair’); the semiotic (an archaeological palimpsest on which prehistoric tribes have recorded their religious intuitions in pictorial shorthand); and the ‘body politic’, once overseen but not altogether tamed by bellicose interlopers who ‘proudly rear[ed] / The Eagle’. The ‘tall brass-helmed legionnaire’ indicates that Britain was once a colonial outpost in somebody else’s empire. There is a disturbingly foreign element in this conception of public, historical actuality, an involved network of signs resistant to assimilation, beyond one’s ‘ken’. That Hardy renders the stretch of road through ‘a process of revealed sedimentation, peeling away multiple layers of past meaning and of past mapping to reach the modern’ (Rode, 2006, 20) only throws into sharper relief the profoundly personal associations of a spot which simultaneously divulges enticing destinations and dismal restrictions. Indeed, ‘[u]prises’ suggests the acutely disruptive otherness of the ‘mother’s form’, as neither material nor ethereal in any clear-cut empirical sense. This intimate yet unsettling wraith cannot be ‘measure[d]’ by ‘thoughtful’ amateur antiquarians who are impelled perhaps by a divisive desire for control, motivated by what they see as strictly scientific issues of verification and authenticity. The speaker affirms the blessings and beats of a different ‘measure’, in defiance of mere representation and synonymous with the grace and expressive possibilities of poetic rhythm.
Those who ‘delve’ in this poem conceptualise the ‘ancient thoroughfare’ as a site which encrypts myriad interpersonal engagements from the most primitive patterns of barter among flint merchants to the sorties of Roman legionaries. For the speaker, however, this unit of geographical inspection is more precisely a dwelling, not only a place for habitation by human beings but also the exercise of reflective memory: the speaker ponders those first halting steps he took as an ‘infant’, guided by his mother over terrain which bears the indelible signatures of long-forgotten tribes. Though ‘The Roman Road’ fails to offer any obvious theological or metaphysical solace, it points towards a historical responsibility for the traces of the past, a bearing witness which invites comparison with yet finally transcends the ‘delving’ into runic symbols embedded in the wider heritage of fosses, ramparts and other concrete memorials of ancient occupation. For the speaker, archaeologists who pursue a conceptual, cultural and historical classification that would lend coherence to the shards of ‘Roman’ records arrogate a certain kind of knowledge which masquerades as a factitious authority. The speaker implies that a modern questing subjectivity is not grounded in the delver’s dogged policing of the threshold or ‘parting-line’ between ‘Now’ and ‘Then’, raw data and poetic artifice, continuance and dislocation, but rather in the inscrutable mysteries such binaries foster.
‘The Roman Road’ demonstrates that Hardy’s alertness to the semiotic status of recovered relics is not a trite antiquarian fascination with their beguiling distance, but rather an excited recognition of their proximity, which emits a ‘muted, measured note’ (‘Friends Beyond’, l. 8). Hardy’s ability to plot the cultural politics of place is engendered by fossil ‘survivals’, reawakening piercing sensations which evade the constraints of deterministic causality (Hughes, 2001, 25). MacNeice’s ‘Wessex Guidebook’ fixes his literary precursor’s archaeological verve as an introverted articulation of an ossifying mode of life, which undervalues Hardy’s persistent, dynamic fusion of lyrical description and meditation. ‘The Roman Road’ revels in the ‘laudable breadth of view’ that Tylor and his followers ascribed to the nascent sciences of humankind in the 1880s, whose subjects ranged from ‘the earliest works of man to those which are only old-fashioned, […] from a Palaeolithic implement to a pair of snuffers’ (1888a, 7). Hardy’s poem ‘The Revisitation’ prioritises concrete remnants similar to the ‘lasting barrows’ that MacNeice depicts in ‘Wessex Guidebook’. As in ‘At Castle Boterel’ (l. 3), the speaker broods over the austere contours of a ‘fading’ world largely bereft of human bustle. This stands in pointed contrast to the findings of the field archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford half a century later, who argued that ‘the large open area’ of Wessex was in prehistoric times ‘thickly populated’ and ‘the centre of gravity of England, to which all roads led’ (1921, 158):
Round about me bulged the barrows
As before, in antique silence – immemorial funeral piles –
Where the sleek herds trampled daily the remains of flint-tipt arrows
Mid the thyme and chamomiles.
(ll. 37–40)
Although ‘The Revisitation’ and to a lesser extent ‘By the Barrows’ evidence Hardy’s fear of the ignorance that would disregard, distort or efface the significance of the uncovered past, this does not mean that he is merely a cultural embalmer. The fragrance of ‘the thyme and chamomiles’ enables the speaker to uncover something crucial about his own cognitive and affective responses; the ‘remains’ of material culture unleash ‘aspects, meanings, shapes’ (‘The Rambler’, l. 14) in dizzying multiplicity. The speaker in ‘The Revisitation’ gauges the discursive tensions between the restraining inhibitions of cool rationality and numinous intuition, the ‘immemorial funeral piles’ and the modish, inventively analytical methods of assessing them, all cut across by the practices and presuppositions of megalithic archaeology, local legend and fable.
A concept or tangible remnant, Tylor remarked, ‘the meaning of which has perished for ages, may continue to exist simply because it has existed’ (1903, I, 71). Tylor saw cromlechs, cairns and tumuli as having utility in the modern moment only as natural ‘museums of early culture’ (1903, I, 61) for zealous archaeologists to ‘delve’ into, as Hardy puts it in ‘The Roman Road’. But ‘The Revisitation’ observes and relishes an expanse incommensurate with an insistently empirical, utilitarian society. If the speaker codes his immediate locale as a gigantic necropolis, then he also revives what has fallen into ruin, decay or desuetude; indeed, the ‘antique silence’ supplies a space for the conjuring of one’s wraiths. That the barrows ‘bulge’ indicates interment is fecundating, a reading confirmed by the poem ‘By the Barrows’, in which round tumuli are ‘bulging as they bosoms were / Of Multimammia stretched supinely there’ (ll. 2–3). Sir Francis Palgrave counselled that ‘[w]e must give it up, that speechless past, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or America […] on Lycian Shore or Salisbury Plain; lost is lost, gone is gone for ever’ (quoted in Lubbock, 1878, 1). However, ‘The Revisitation’ signals the steady accrual of archaeological data that are passed on through generations as visible vestiges like the powdering of flint flakes and potsherds. The poem also divulges a subliminal heritage whose keynote is not always a soothing sense of ‘sweet continuance’ (‘Her Immortality’, l. 38). Instead of a coherent configuration of meanings, the speaker exposes a cluster of elemental pulses and native auras that withstand aesthetic formalisation. In ‘The Revisitation’ Tylorian ‘survivals’ are not merely ragged reminders of provenance, but comprise an intricate compendium of disparate historical experiences that debunks a chronological feeling of duration or logical and sequential elaboration from one fleeting impression to the next. Through such tropes and narrative trajectories Hardy asks to what extent memories are transcendentally fused over time and space through the ‘interference’ of palpable ‘remains’. The lyric self, ‘[a]rrested by perceptions’ (‘Prologue’, l. 9) and elusive patches of colour, becomes not only dispersed but also ‘coextensive’ with a barrow-studded milieu and the chthonic past (see Vrettos, 2007).
III
If Celtic and Roman monuments function as copious repositories of spectral activity, the most formidable ‘survivals’ in Hardy’s poetic ‘excavations’ (‘Aquae Sulis’, l. 4) are those which boast little apparent archaeological or ethnographic merit. ‘Old Furniture’ confronts and processes the powerfully dislocating potential of homely appurtenances. An 1858 contribution to the antiquarian journal Archaeologia Cantiana canvassed how timeworn buildings such as manor houses or farmsteads ‘bear upon their faces the legible records of the past’ (Anon., 1858, 6). In ‘Old Furniture’, ‘[r]elics of householdry’ (l. 2) are not only scored by the past but also absorb and radiate the sporadic promptings of unconscious feeling, making them more evocative than ‘Rome’s dim relics’ (‘The Roman Gravemounds’, l. 1). Domestic clutter has, in addition to sensuous concreteness, a special poignancy and reanimating potential. Through this residue the speaker visualises the past stretching back into a domain of ‘spectres rife’ (‘San Sebastian’, l. 2). Hardy’s poem is redolent of the quotation from William Barnes’s ‘Woak Hill’ which Hardy exploits with reference to ‘old furniture’ in Far from the Madding Crowd ([1874] 1993, 406): ‘all a-sheenen / Wi’ long years o’ handlen’. From evoking imperilled prehistoric residues in the ‘archaeological’ poems, the speaker of ‘Old Furniture’ concentrates on ‘the rediscovery and refeeling of the familiar’ (Richardson, 1977, 78).
However, the poem belies the critical opinion that one of Hardy’s ‘obsessive ideas’ is ‘the irreversible pastness of the past’ (Hynes, 1961, 4). Instead ‘Old Furniture’, like ‘At Castle Boterel’ to which it is metrically analogous, underscores the impossibility of freeing oneself from the extraordinary weight of ‘memories multitudinous’ (‘Rome at the Pyramid of Cestius’, l. 3):
I know not how it may be with others
Who sit amid relics of householdry
That date from the days’ of their mothers’ mothers,
But well I know how it is with me
Continually.
I see the hands of the generations
That owned each shiny familiar thing
In play on its knobs and indentations,
And with its ancient fashioning
Still dallying:
Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler,
As in a mirror a candle-flame
Shows images of itself, each frailer,
As it recedes, though the eye may frame
Its shape the same.
On the clock’s dull dial a foggy finger,
Moving to set the minutes right
With tentative touches that lift and linger
In the wont of a moth on a summer night,
Creeps to my sight.
On this old viol, too, fingers are dancing –
As whilom – just over the strings by the nut,
The tip of a bow receding, advancing
In airy quivers, as if it would cut
The plaintive gut.
And I see a face by that box for tinder,
Glowing forth in fits from the dark,
And fading again, as the linten cinder
Kindles to red at the flinty spark,
Or goes out stark.
Well, well. It is best to be up and doing,
The world has no use for one to-day
Who eyes things thus – no aim pursuing!
He should not continue in this stay,
But sink away.
The speaker acknowledges that he is precariously poised on an anthropological fault-line – a version of the ‘parting-line’ in ‘The Roman Road’ – a space between a reflexive modernity and an already defunct epoch (‘He should not continue in this stay, / But sink away’). Indeed, the glinting of the light of vision makes this poem a place of ‘shades’ in every sense. Hardy employs a common metre with an added dimeter line, plus myriad trisyllabic substitutions, to convey, both visually and rhythmically, that the speaker’s rapt ruminations are modified by the lulling effect of the flickering flames. At the same time the ‘mirror’ recalls the ‘long perspective’ and receding images in the looking glass of ‘The Pedigree’ (l. 17). In ‘The Roman Road’ Hardy validates the time-crusted terrain in the final line after apparently abjuring the amateur antiquarian sensibility earlier in the poem. ‘Old Furniture’ evidences the opposite structural ploy. The speaker’s clipped modulations, charged with the cadences of deceased family relatives, evince a stoical resignation, even existential ennui, in the final stanza (‘Well, well. It is best to be up and doing’), yet this is belied by the chain of imagination preceding it.
According to J. Hillis Miller, we overhear in ‘Old Furniture’ the ‘unceasing private ruminations of a solitary, brooding mind’ (1972, 225). What this reading overlooks is the note of confusion as the speaker chronicles a troubled adjustment to the chthonic vivacity of life beyond the grave. Involuntary promptings of thought fluently intermingle and overstep mental boundaries, ‘in play’ beyond or decoupled from the individual minds that harboured them (Hughes, 2001, 15). The speaker himself seems to ‘come alive’ only through retrospective curiosity: in this abode of clansmen past, a recollected scene has another striking figuration folded within it, and through this recognition the speaker discerns that he himself is a ‘survival’, burnt out (hence the flickering flames?) and profoundly out of kilter with the social and cultural formation of modernity. His anachronistic sensibility – or more exactly a mood of being misplaced in time and ‘flickering’ between the confessional and the cryptic – is enacted in a verbal performance which subverts linguistic and phonological proprieties. It is apt that the speaker disinters the archaism ‘whilom’ to convey the dissonant, unruly and wayward potency of former idioms which send impulses between temporally or physically estranged entities. The fire casts images which are described as ‘[g]lowing forth in fits from the dark, / And fading again, as the linten cinder / Kindles to red at the flinty spark, / Or goes out stark’. The firelight dallies over the ‘relics’, which become conduits by which the speaker’s fugitive impressions can diversify into other spectral patterns: the tentative touches of a moth, like fingers brushing a clock, the unearthly glow of faces (as in the opening gambit of ‘During Wind and Rain’) and fingers ‘dancing’ on an ‘old viol’. Just as the household items have acquired a patina through repeated and affectionate use, so the speaker wishes to be imposed upon by or imprinted with delicate ripples of uncanny activity.
Such subliminal correspondences contrast with the ‘plaintive gut’ – a deliberately jarring collocation of bilabial and velar stops that is as far from pleasing tonal harmony as the poem’s ‘gnarls’ of verbal ‘masonry’ (‘Rome: Building a New Street in the Ancient Quarter’, l. 1) are from standard categories of polished elegance. The perturbingly visceral ‘gut’ undercuts the mournful musings of ‘plaintive’. This errant effect suggests the vagaries of lyric feeling that return obsessively to figurations of the family homestead as an echoing emptiness, a tomb where one becomes posthumous, ‘goes out’, ‘sink[s] away’ (see Hardy, 2009; Bäckman, 2001; Hughes, 2001). It is a delicious irony that the speaker’s cautious, watchful self-command and willingness to fade out in this poem have often been judged by commentators as evidencing Hardy’s ‘deep-seated tendency to poetic egotism in self-memorializing’ (Neill, 1999, 55). As Julian Wolfreys argues, the merely living witness in this poem, with his eidetic memory, is ‘more truly dead than those who are simply deceased’ (2009, 5). But the apprehension of the past’s incremental capacity to revive after burial raises urgent questions about the spatial and temporal dislocation of memories, how seemingly evanescent sensations migrate from ‘Then’ to ‘Now’ and, in the words of ‘Her Death and After’, ‘mock the chime / Of our Christian time’ (ll. 78–79) by holding it in abeyance.
Hardy’s poetic focus on Tylorian ‘survivals’, instead of expressing ‘anxiety of eschatological trauma’ (Wolfreys, 2009, 10), offers what Vern Lentz terms an ‘aesthetic of disjunction’ (1995, 134) which yields bracing insights into the arcane while being rooted in the materially acknowledged circumstances of subjectivity. If the living in Hardy’s poems tend to be ‘etiolated shadows’ (Schneidau, 1991, 31), epitomising ‘spent social energies’ (Hardy, 1986c, 9), the presence of ancestral revenants becomes a ‘strange allure’ (‘Family Portraits’, l. 21). Hardy himself possesses the profoundly restive imagination of a Tylorian anthropologist, relishing the collisions between the antique and the current, the mystical and the tangible, the fetishistic and the forensic. However, he wittily re-brands this scientific role as connoisseurship of the apparitions concealed within and released by domestic detritus. Like his grandmother in ‘One We Knew’, he lingers ‘on such dead themes, not as one who remembers, / But rather as one who sees’ (ll. 27–28). This seeing carries an ineffaceable positive charge. The ‘history’ of survival, Tylor averred, ‘has for the most part been a history of […] decay. As men’s minds change in progressing culture, old customs and opinions fade gradually in a new and uncongenial atmosphere, or pass into states more congruous with the new life around them’ (1903, I, 16). Tylor inadvertently deploys a key Hardyan term – ‘fade’ – that functions as a mantra in ‘The Ghost of the Past’, whose ‘form began to fade, / Began to fade’ (ll. 25–26). This resounds not only with MacNeice’s acerbic version of Hardy as the gatekeeper of a ‘fading world’ in ‘Wessex Guidebook’ but also calls to mind the ‘fading byway’ of Castle Boterel (‘At Castle Boterel’, l. 3) and the ‘fading’ face in the penultimate stanza of ‘Old Furniture’. Such associations of recession, dispersal and the crepuscular paradoxically foster in Hardy’s speakers an augmented sense of affinity with a surviving recondite bequest which slyly proclaims its own incongruity by dusting the contours of diurnal props with eerie imprints and even irradiating ‘dull-hued Days’ (‘A Commonplace Day’, l. 15).