영어로 읽는 고전 _ 토마스 하디의 녹음 아래서_멜스톡 성가대
토마스 하디의 『녹음 아래서: 또는 멜스톡 성가대』는 1872년에 출판된 소설이다. 가상의 마을 멜스톡을 배경으로, 전통적인 교구 성가대의 일원인 젊은 딕 듀이가 아름다운 새 여교사 팬시 데이에게 반하는 이야기를 따라간다. 새로 부임한 목사가 성가대의 현악 연주를 현대적인 오르간으로 교체하려 위협하는 가운데, 딕은 변화하는 시대의 흐름과 팬시의 마음을 차지하려는 부유한 경쟁자들의 낭만적 경쟁 사이를 헤쳐나가야 한다. 이 작품은 영국 농촌 생활의 매력적인 초상화이다.
Classics Read in English _ Under the Greenwood Tree; Or, The Mellstock Quire by Thomas Hardy
Under the Greenwood Tree is Thomas Hardy in his most sunlit and most generous mood — a novel so warm, so gently comic, and so suffused with the sights and sounds of rural English life that it feels less like a work of fiction and more like a long, affectionate memory of a world that was already, even as Hardy wrote it, beginning to disappear.
Published in 1872, it is Hardy's earliest fully realized work — the first novel in which his fictional Wessex breathes with genuine life — and it announces his gifts not with darkness and tragedy, but with something rarer and in some ways more difficult to sustain: pure, uncomplicated delight. The village of Mellstock is rendered with such sensory richness — its lanes and farmhouses and autumn orchards, its community of musicians who have played together for so long that their instruments seem to breathe in time with each other — that the reader feels genuinely, physically present in it.
At the center of the story is Dick Dewy, a young man of the parish choir whose heart is comprehensively captured by Fancy Day, the beautiful and rather more complicated new schoolmistress. Fancy is one of Hardy's most charming early heroines — vivacious, self-aware, and possessed of a talent for being admired that she enjoys perhaps a little more than is entirely wise. The romantic competition between Dick and his wealthier rivals is handled with a light, sure comic touch that Hardy rarely allowed himself in later works.
But beneath the novel's pastoral warmth, Hardy is already asking the questions that would define his career. The threat to replace the choir's handmade, imperfect, deeply human string music with a modern organ is not merely a plot device — it is the novel's quiet, central grief: the loss of something irreplaceable in the name of progress, the silencing of a particular kind of beauty that the modern world, in its efficiency, cannot quite hear. Under the Greenwood Tree is Hardy before the tragedies — and it is, on its own terms, one of the most purely pleasurable novels in the English language.
Among the contents
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.
