Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/106

 tiveness went a certain physical sluggishness and diffidence. The reason for this is not difficult to apprehend. The child Hardy of course associated with the youngsters of the hamlet. While he played with them in abandoned jollity, and while he talked with them in the utmost gravity, as children do, he lost himself in their somewhat loutish habits, manners and language. But when he sought to transplant these experiences into his home-life, as children do, he discovered to his astonishment that these were not the proper, dignified things for a Hardy to do. The father, and especially the mother, frowned on all that was rural or crude. Hardy learned that there was an invisible but rigid barrier between the life within his home and the life outside it. He had to learn to trim his sails in both places accordingly. At home he learned to affect his mother's manners; also, like Elizabeth-Jane, to say "stay where you are," instead of "bide where you be," "succeed" instead of "fay," "wild hyacinths" instead of "greggles," "suffering from indigestion" instead of "hag-rid." In the lanes and fields with his playmates, on the other hand, he soon learned to forget the glossy sheen of culture and polite education. Thus, at the age of six, Hardy was already leading a double life.

At the same time, the growing consciousness of his family's social position, although this position was itself rather indeterminate, induced in him a growing and uncomfortable shyness while associating with his childhood cronies. He drew himself away from them, spiritually, as his mother's attitude made itself felt more and more poignantly. He became merely observant at times when he should have been joining whole-heartedly in the diver-