Pastoral, Romantic, and rooted in the landscape and folk customs of the West Country, Under the Greenwood Tree is a gentle portrait of English village life in a bygone era. This was Thomas Hardy's second published novel, and there is a sweetness and simplicity to this story quite unlike the later complex and tragic novels which people are most likely to associate with the name of Hardy.
Under the Greenwood Tree is such a lovely title, but if we give it its full name we learn something of Hardy's intentions and the evolution of the book - Under the Greenwood Tree, or The Mellstock Quire: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School. The novel is concerned with the doings of the Mellstock parish choir, focusing on one of its younger members, Dick Dewy, and his romantic pursuit of the new schoolmistress, the gloriously named Fancy Day. Hardy's original inspiration for the story was drawn from a real-life conflict between his grandfather's string choir and a new vicar who wanted to replace the choir with organ music.
I went down a bit of a rabbit trail about west gallery music, in trying to understand the practices of the Mellstock quire. This was a type of church music common in English parish churches ca 1700-1850. The choir would perform in a wooden gallery typically constructed at the west end of the church. Stringed instruments accompanied the singing, along with flutes, clarinets, and bassoons.
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| The Village Choir by Thomas Webster, ca 1847. While I think this painting is helpful in picturing the scenes of the book, some of the members of the all-male Mellstock quire would have deplored the presence of these "brazen hussies" and those infamous clarinets. |
Hardy's second subtitle, A Rural Painting of the Dutch School, is such a beautiful touch. Dutch rural painting, from the Baroque era through the 19th century, is known for naturalistic scenes of country folk going about their daily lives, with a touch of atmospheric Romanticism which elevates the everyday bucolic to art. This, for me, is an apt metaphor for Thomas Hardy's writing.
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| A painting of the Dutch school |
The book's main title is taken from the song "Under the Greenwood Tree," sung in the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare's most pastoral play, As You Like It, thus firmly linking Hardy's novel with the English pastoral tradition. Under the Greenwood Tree has been described as a "prose idyll," and I cannot think of more fitting description. I love the way that the book's divisions are named for the seasons, progressing through Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn. We are treated to snatches of rural customs and folk belief in each season of the year, from gathering honey to going nutting to visiting a "witch" who surely echoes such celebrated figures as the Cornish wise woman Tamsin Blee. We are always aware of inhabiting a lost world while immersed in these pages, and the sense of old ways passing away imbues the book with just a hint of that bittersweet melancholy longing for days that cannot come again. It somewhat reminded me of Lark Rise to Candleford, a book which I have dipped in and out of many times and have committed to reading in its entirety for my Classics Club Challenge.
Hardy's writing is at its evocative and descriptive best, so I will close with this passage about the Greenwood Tree:
"The point in Yalbury Wood which abutted on the end of Geoffrey Day’s premises was closed with an ancient tree, horizontally of enormous extent, though having no great pretensions to height. Many hundreds of birds had been born amidst the boughs of this single tree; tribes of rabbits and hares had nibbled at its bark from year to year; quaint tufts of fungi had sprung from the cavities of its forks; and countless families of moles and earthworms had crept about its roots. Beneath and beyond its shade spread a carefully-tended grass-plot, its purpose being to supply a healthy exercise-ground for young chickens and pheasants; the hens, their mothers, being enclosed in coops placed upon the same green flooring."
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