Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/44

 TILES, OR OTHER MATERIAL FROM THIS EARTHWORK, OR CUTTING UP THE GROUND, WILL BE PROSECUTED AS THE LAW DIRECTS.

Above you, then, is Mai Dun, popularly called "Maiden Castle," the prehistoric British fortress, unique in that Hardy has treated it objectively, but has never introduced it into his transfigured Wessex. It needs no transfiguration. The ceremonial of deification would be wasted on a divinity.

You are tired after you have scaled the three separate earthwork rings at the summit. An eager, biting wind lashes you persistently. You feel the icy polar breaths that once stung the hapless Tess on the uplands over there. You brace yourself against them; you stand on the edge and look out towards the north, for miles and miles. It is a brilliant prospect.

Still, it is a dim twilight-panorama by the time your mind has assimilated it. It is not your breathless weariness that makes it seem twilit. It is the accumulation of impressions and thoughts that have been bubbling in your consciousness for four-and-twenty hours: the fermentation of a dominating, tyrannical mood.

A single, humble human intelligence, detached, aloof, penetrating, pitying, has sent forth in certain printed pages an ectoplasmic radiation that has permeated the Kingdom you see. This transfigured Kingdom provides vicarious tragedy, in the Greek sense of the word, for all who find a dearth of tragedy in their lives. This miracle happens wherever books are read on earth.

Twilight settles over it all, over the Wessex Kingdom and over the whole spiritually enriched world, as the last