Seasonal and Serial Time: Under the Greenwood Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes

Abstract

Our opening quotations contrast passages from Hardy’s second and third novels: an invigorating and poetically rendered late-summer landscape in Under the Greenwood Tree or The Mellstock Quire (1872), its botanical content evoked with microscopic detail through the sensitive eyes of the narrator. From a proximal/close-up perspective, the tactile qualities and chromatic nuances of the scene are registered, its floral species and insect life are enumerated, and a lyrical framework established into which the courting couple of Fancy Day and Dick Dewy are shortly introduced. In visual and perceptual terms, the second passage, from A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), could not be more different, with figurative microscope exchanged for literal telescope. From a distal/ remote perspective, one of the actors in the novel’s key triangular relationship between heroine and two suitors focuses from the cliff-top on a boat steaming by off the coast. Henry Knight sights a passenger on the Puffin, who in turn is training a telescope on themselves; only Elfride Swancourt, however, can identify him as Stephen Smith, her first lover, returning from India. The full irony of the situation and the striking simultaneity of observers/observed is heightened by the dramatic present-tense dialogue format, as the two rivals for her hand engage, unbeknownst to one another, in long-distance visual contact.

It was a morning of the latter summer-time — a morning of lingering dews, when the grass is never dry in the shade. Fuchsias and dahlias were laden till eleven o’clock with small drops and dashes of water, changing the colour of their sparkle at every movement of the air; and elsewhere hanging on twigs like small silver fruit. The threads of garden-spiders appeared thick and polished. In the dry and sunny places dozens of long-legged crane-flies whizzed off the grass at every step the passer took.¹

Knight raised the glass to his eye, and swept the sea till the Puffin entered its field.

‘Yes, it is the Puffin — a tiny craft. I can see her figurehead distinctly — a bird with a beak as big as its head.’

‘Can you see the deck?’

‘Wait a minute; yes, pretty clearly. And I can see the black forms of the passengers against its white surface. One of them has taken something from another — a glass, I think — yes, it is — and he is levelling it in this direction. Depend upon it we are conspicuous objects against the sky to them. Now, it seems to rain upon them, and they put on overcoats and open umbrellas. They vanish and go below — all but that one who has borrowed the glass. He is a slim young fellow, and still watches us.’

Elfride grew pale, and shifted her little feet uneasily.²