Her imagination was fired by the squire's lady at Shelly
Hall, who came to church at Cossethay with her little children,
girls in tidy capes of beaver fur, and smart little hats,
herself like a winter rose, so fair and delicate. So fair, so
fine in mould, so luminous, what was it that Mrs. Hardy felt
which she, Mrs. Brangwen, did not feel? How was Mrs. Hardy's
nature different from that of the common women of Cossethay, in
what was it beyond them? All the women of Cossethay talked
eagerly about Mrs. Hardy, of her husband, her children, her
guests, her dress, of her servants and her housekeeping. The
lady of the Hall was the living dream of their lives, her life
was the epic that inspired their lives. In her they lived
imaginatively, and in gossiping of her husband who drank, of her
scandalous brother, of Lord William Bentley her friend, member
of Parliament for the division, they had their own Odyssey
enacting itself, Penelope and Ulysses before them, and Circe and
the swine and the endless web.
So the women of the village were fortunate. They saw
themselves in the lady of the manor, each of them lived her own
fulfilment of the life of Mrs. Hardy. And the Brangwen wife of
the Marsh aspired beyond herself, towards the further life of
the finer woman, towards the extended being she revealed, as a
traveller in his self-contained manner reveals far-off countries
present in himself. But why should a knowledge of far-off
countries make a man's life a different thing, finer, bigger?
And why is a man more than the beast and the cattle that serve
him? It is the same thing.
The male part of the poem was filled in by such men as the
vicar and Lord William, lean, eager men with strange movements,
men who had command of the further fields, whose lives ranged
over a great extent. Ah, it was something very desirable to
know, this touch of the wonderful men who had the power of
thought and comprehension. The women of the village might be
much fonder of Tom Brangwen, and more at their ease with him,
yet if their lives had been robbed of the vicar, and of Lord
William, the leading shoot would have been cut away from them,
they would have been heavy and uninspired and inclined to hate.
So long as the wonder of the beyond was before them, they could
get along, whatever their lot. And Mrs. Hardy, and the vicar,
and Lord William, these moved in the wonder of the beyond, and
were visible to the eyes of Cossethay in their motion.