Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/69



Y many a literary incantation such as this has Thomas Hardy called into being and summoned up before his readers the Genii of his native country. Or, viewed from a slightly different angle, "Wessex" has been to him a vast stage upon which things both animate and inanimate have been woven together in comic and tragic patterns, as the winds of chance blew upon them, or as causal chains, stretching infinitely into the past, have determined them.

"Wessex" has been to Hardy primarily a land of associations. He never walked through it saying, "So, and so, and so, might events have complicated themselves—thus, and thus, in such a place." He rather imagined, "Here tragedies did actually play themselves out, and did actually lead on, and will always lead on, to further