Under the Greenwood Tree
Thomas Hardy
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UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE
or
THE MELLSTOCK QUIRE
A RURAL PAINTING OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL
by Thomas Hardy
PREFACE
This story of the Mellstock Quire and its old established west-gallery
musicians, with some supplementary descriptions of similar officials in
Two on a Tower, A Few Crusted Characters, and other places, is intended
to be a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and
customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the villages of
fifty or sixty years ago.
One is inclined to regret the displacement of these ecclesiastical
bandsmen by an isolated organist (often at first a barrel-organist) or
harmonium player; and despite certain advantages in point of control and
accomplishment which were, no doubt, secured by installing the single
artist, the change has tended to stultify the professed aims of the
clergy, its direct result being to curtail and extinguish the interest of
parishioners in church doings. Under the old plan, from half a dozen to
ten full-grown players, in addition to the numerous more or less grown-up
singers, were officially occupied with the Sunday routine, and concerned
in trying their best to make it an artistic outcome of the combined
musical taste of the congregation. With a musical executive limited, as
it mostly is limited now, to the parson's wife or daughter and the school-
children, or to the school-teacher and the children, an important union
of interests has disappeared.
The zest of these bygone instrumentalists must have been keen and staying
to take them, as it did, on foot every Sunday after a toilsome week,
through all weathers, to the church, which often lay at a distance from
their homes. They usually received so little in payment for their
performances that their efforts were really a labour of love. In the
parish I had in my mind when writing the present tale, the gratuities
received yearly by the musicians at Christmas were somewhat as follows:
From the manor-house ten shillings and a supper; from the vicar ten
shillings; from the farmers five shillings each; from each
cottage-household one shilling; amounting altogether to not more than ten
shillings a head annually--just enough, as an old executant told me, to
pay for their fiddle-strings, repairs, rosin, and music-paper (which they
mostly ruled themselves). Their music in those days was all in their own
manuscript, copied in the evenings after work, and their music-books were
home-bound.
It was customary to inscribe a few jigs, reels, horn-pipes, and ballads
in the same book, by beginning it at the other end, the insertions being
continued from front and back till sacred and secular met together in the
middle, often with bizarre effect, the words of some of the songs
exhibiting that ancient and broad humour which our grandfathers, and
possibly grandmothers, took delight in, and is in these days unquotable.
The aforesaid fiddle-strings, rosin, and music-paper were supplied by a
pedlar, who travelled exclusively in such wares from parish to parish,
coming to each village about every six months. Tales are told of the
consternation once caused among the church fiddlers when, on the occasion
of their producing a new Christmas anthem, he did not come to time, owing
to being snowed up on the downs, and the straits they were in through
having to make shift with whipcord and twine for strings. He was
generally a musician himself, and sometimes a composer in a small way,
bringing his own new tunes, and tempting each choir to adopt them for a
consideration. Some of these compositions which now lie before me, with
their repetitions of lines, half-lines, and half-words, their fugues and
their intermediate symphonies, are good singing still, though they would
hardly be admitted into such hymn-books as are popular in the churches of
fashionable society at the present time.
August 1896.
Under the Greenwood Tree was first brought out in the summer of 1872 in
two volumes. The name of the story was originally intended to be, more
appropriately, The Mellstock Quire, and this has been appended as a sub-
title since the early editions, it having been thought unadvisable to
displace for it the title by which the book first became known.
In rereading the narrative after a long interval there occurs the
inevitable reflection that the realities out of which it was spun were
material for another kind of study of this little group of church
musicians than is found in the chapters here penned so lightly, even so
farcically and flippantly at times. But circumstances would have
rendered any aim at a deeper, more essential, more transcendent handling
unadvisable at the date of writing; and the exhibition of the Mellstock
Quire in the following pages must remain the only extant one, except for
the few glimpses of that perished band which I have given in verse
elsewhere.
T. H.
April 1912.
PART THE FIRST--WINTER
CHAPTER I: MELLSTOCK-LANE
To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well
as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan
no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with
itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its
flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such
trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality.
On a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man was passing
up a lane towards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a plantation that
whispered thus distinctively to his intelligence. All the evidences of
his nature were those afforded by the spirit of his footsteps, which
succeeded each other lightly and quickly, and by the liveliness of his
voice as he sang in a rural cadence:
"With the rose and the lily
And the daffodowndilly,
The lads and the lasses a-sheep-shearing go."
The lonely lane he was following connected one of the hamlets of
Mellstock parish with Upper Mellstock and Lewgate, and to his eyes,
casually glancing upward, the silver and black-stemmed birches with their
characteristic tufts, the pale grey boughs of beech, the dark-creviced
elm, all appeared now as black and flat outlines upon the sky, wherein
the white stars twinkled so vehemently that their flickering seemed like
the flapping of wings. Within the woody pass, at a level anything lower
than the horizon, all was dark as the grave. The copse-wood forming the
sides of the bower interlaced its branches so densely, even at this
season of the year, that the draught from the north-east flew along the
channel with scarcely an interruption from lateral breezes.
After passing the plantation and reaching Mellstock Cross the white
surface of the lane revealed itself between the dark hedgerows like a
ribbon jagged at the edges; the irregularity being caused by temporary
accumulations of leaves extending from the ditch on either side.
The song (many times interrupted by flitting thoughts which took the
place of several bars, and resumed at a point it would have reached had
its continuity been unbroken) now received a more palpable check, in the
shape of "Ho-i-i-i-i-i!" from the crossing lane to Lower Mellstock, on
the right of the singer who had just emerged from the trees.
"Ho-i-i-i-i-i!" he answered, stopping and looking round, though with no
idea of seeing anything more than imagination pictured.
"Is that thee, young Dick Dewy?" came from the darkness.
"Ay, sure, Michael Mail."
"Then why not stop for fellow-craters--going to thy own father's house
too, as we be, and knowen us so well?"
Dick Dewy faced about and continued his tune in an under-whistle,
implying that the business of his mouth could not be checked at a
moment's notice by the placid emotion of friendship.
Having come more into the open he could now be seen rising against the
sky, his profile appearing on the light background like the portrait of a
gentleman in black cardboard. It assumed the form of a low-crowned hat,
an ordinary-shaped nose, an ordinary chin, an ordinary neck, and ordinary
shoulders. What he consisted of further down was invisible from lack of
sky low enough to picture him on.
Shuffling, halting, irregular footsteps of various kinds were now heard
coming up the hill, and presently there emerged from the shade severally
five men of different ages and gaits, all of them working villagers of
the parish of Mellstock. They, too, had lost their rotundity with the
daylight, and advanced against the sky in flat outlines, which suggested
some processional design on Greek or Etruscan pottery. They represented
the chief portion of Mellstock parish choir.
The first was a bowed and bent man, who carried a fiddle under his arm,
and walked as if engaged in studying some subject connected with the
surface of the road. He was Michael Mail, the man who had hallooed to
Dick.
The next was Mr. Robert Penny, boot- and shoemaker; a little man, who,
though rather round-shouldered, walked as if that fact had not come to
his own knowledge, moving on with his back very hollow and his face fixed
on the north-east quarter of the heavens before him, so that his lower
waist-coat-buttons came first, and then the remainder of his figure. His
features were invisible; yet when he occasionally looked round, two faint
moons of light gleamed for an instant from the precincts of his eyes,
denoting that he wore spectacles of a circular form.
The third was Elias Spinks, who walked perpendicularly and dramatically.
The fourth outline was Joseph Bowman's, who had now no distinctive
appearance beyond that of a human being. Finally came a weak lath-like
form, trotting and stumbling along with one shoulder forward and his head
inclined to the left, his arms dangling nervelessly in the wind as if
they were empty sleeves. This was Thomas Leaf.
"Where be the boys?" said Dick to this somewhat indifferently-matched
assembly.
The eldest of the group, Michael Mail, cleared his throat from a great
depth.
"We told them to keep back at home for a time, thinken they wouldn't be
wanted yet awhile; and we could choose the tuens, and so on."
"Father and grandfather William have expected ye a little sooner. I have
just been for a run round by Ewelease Stile and Hollow Hill to warm my
feet."
"To be sure father did! To be sure 'a did expect us--to taste the little
barrel beyond compare that he's going to tap."
"'Od rabbit it all! Never heard a word of it!" said Mr. Penny, gleams of
delight appearing upon his spectacle-glasses, Dick meanwhile singing
parenthetically--
"The lads and the lasses a-sheep-shearing go."
"Neighbours, there's time enough to drink a sight of drink now afore
bedtime?" said Mail.
"True, true--time enough to get as drunk as lords!" replied Bowman
cheerfully.
This opinion being taken as convincing they all advanced between the
varying hedges and the trees dotting them here and there, kicking their
toes occasionally among the crumpled leaves. Soon appeared glimmering
indications of the few cottages forming the small hamlet of Upper
Mellstock for which they were bound, whilst the faint sound of church-
bells ringing a Christmas peal could be heard floating over upon the
breeze from the direction of Longpuddle and Weatherbury parishes on the
other side of the hills. A little wicket admitted them to the garden,
and they proceeded up the path to Dick's house.
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