Tree and Machine: The Woodlanders

Abstract

Celebrating the Norse myth of Nature, Carlyle mourns the death of organicism. Igdrasil has become a fiction, the Tree of Existence displaced by a demythologised and mechanistic world: ‘The “Ma- chine of the Universe,” — alas, do but think of that in contrast!’ The same reduction of myth to machine haunts The Woodlatiders. Hardy laments a lost mythology as well as the rape of the woods by rootless predators from the modem world. The novel is pervaded by elegy for which the death of Giles Winterborne is the declared focus, and trees the silent mourners — ‘The whole wood seemed to be a house of death, pervaded by loss to its uttermost length and breadth. Winterborne was gone, and the copses seemed to show the want of him’ (xliii; pp. 393 – 4). To Grace’s imagination, Giles becomes a tutelary spirit (‘He rose upon her memory as the fruit-god and the wood-god in alternation’ [xxxvm; p. 33$]); but his death also signifies the depletion of Nature by an anatomising scientific vision. Subjected to a post-Romantic gaze, Nature reveals the same defects, the same crippling evolutionary struggle, as urban industrial society.

Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of Existence, has its roots deep-down in the kingdoms of Hela or Death; its trunk reaches up heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe: it is the Tree of Existence. … Is not every leaf of it a biography, every fibre there an act or word? Its boughs are Histories of Nations. The rustle of it is the noise of Human Existence, onwards from of old. It grows there, the breath of Human Passion rustling through it. … It is the past, the present, and the future; what was done, what is doing, what will be done. … Considering how human things circulate, each in-extricably in communion with all, … I find no similitude so true as this of a Tree.… The ‘ Machine of the Universe,’ — alas, do but think of that in contrast!

Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship¹