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Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry
Mark Ford
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192886804.001.0001
Published: 2023 Online ISBN: 9780191981708 Print ISBN: 9780192886804
FRONT MATTER
Copyright Page
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192886804.002.0003 Page iv
Published: June 2023
Subject: Literary Studies (20th Century onwards), Literary Studies (19th Century)
Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
p. iv
United Kingdom
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
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ISBN 978–0–19–288680–4
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192886804.001.0001
All quotations from Hardy’s poetry are taken from Thomas Hardy: The
Complete Poems, edited by James Gibson and published by Palgrave
Macmillan.
What was effectively Hardy’s autobiography was initially issued by
Macmillan in two instalments, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891
(1928) and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928 (1930), under the
name of his second wife, Florence Hardy. It was subsequently published in a
single volume as The Life of Thomas Hardy. It emerged in due course,
however, that, although the text was written in the third person, Hardy was
himself responsible for all but the book’s last chapters. An edition of the
original typescript that Florence prepared from Hardy’s longhand
manuscript and from original sources such as letters and journal entries
was published by Michael Millgate in 1984 under the title The Life and Work
of Thomas Hardy. The textual apparatus in this edition includes the
alterations that Florence made to the typescript after Hardy’s death. It is
from Millgate’s edition, its title shortened to the Life, that quotations are
taken in this book.
Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used to indicate the sources of quotations from
primary texts (see Selected Bibliography for full publication details):
The following abbreviations are used to indicate the sources of quotations from
secondary sources:
References not given in the text are on the same page as the previous quotation.
Preface
Nearly one-fifth of the 919 poems included by Hardy in his eight collections
of poetry published between 1898 and 1928 (the year of his death at the age
of eighty-seven) are concerned with his first wife, Emma.1 The poems that
make up the other four-fifths of his oeuvre present a dizzyingly diverse
array of narratives and genres. Hardy liked to compare his approach to
poetry to that of a Gothic architect, and perhaps the only workable analogy
for prolonged immersion in the intricately patterned but bewilderingly
disjunctive compendium that is The Complete Poems in their totality is
wandering around an immense Gothic cathedral whose multifarious niches
can accommodate poems on any topic under the sun, from the death of
God to the infatuation of a turnip-hoer with a lady whom he rescues when
the horses pulling her carriage bolt, from the feelings of a mongrel as he
realizes he is being deliberately drowned by his impoverished owner to
those of Edward Gibbon as he finishes The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire.2 Attempts to create a useful taxonomy of Hardy’s poems, or to
impose a chronological narrative of development on his eight highly
miscellaneous volumes (which tend to mix up poems from widely differing
phases of his writing life), founder on the monumental scale of his poetic
oeuvre and the openness to contingency and multiplicity built into his
ars poetica.
It has become routine for admirers of Hardy to marvel at the difficulty of
finding a critical language or approach commensurate with the range and
idiosyncrasies of his poetry. ‘It is nothing short of comical’, observed Donald
Davie in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry back in 1973,
1 The full titles of these eight collections are: Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898), Poems
of the Past and the Present (1901), Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909), Satires of
Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914), Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917),
Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925), and
Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928).
2 ‘God’s Funeral’ (CP 326–9), ‘The Turnip-Hoer’ (CP 703–6), ‘The Mongrel’ (CP 877),
‘Lausanne: In Gibbon’s Old Garden: 11–12 p.m.’ (CP 105–6).
xiv Preface
that a criticism which can make shift to come to terms with Ezra Pound or
Apollinaire, Charles Olson or René Char, should have to confess itself
unable to appraise with confidence a body of verse writing like Hardy’s,
which at first glance offers so much less of a challenge to tested assump-
tions and time-honoured procedures.3
The fullest and most sophisticated recent account of the difficulties posed
by Hardy’s verse to the would-be critic is by Marjorie Levinson. In ‘Object-
Loss and Object-Bondage: Economies of Representation in Hardy’s Poetry’
(2006), she argues that Hardy’s poems are unique in their indifference to
how they might be interpreted, and that this self-sufficiency leaves the
reader stranded in a baffling void:
What we have here is a body of work that appears not to solicit or even to
acknowledge reading. It does not tell us how we should value it nor does it
appear to care whether or not we do. It withdraws from reading without a
hint of condescension, self-absorption, or even self-awareness.4
And yet, after wittily and eloquently staging the various dilemmas and
impasses involved in attempting to assess Hardy’s poetry with the techniques
used by critics to assess the work of other major twentieth-century poets,
both Davie and Levinson develop analyses of individual poems that are at
once instructive and illuminating. There is no gainsaying, however, the
overall thrust of their arguments, that Hardy’s poetry and modern criticism
might be compared to oil and water, a point first made by Philip Larkin in a
review of some dispiriting volumes on Hardy published in 1966.5 While
critical tomes on the likes of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens
and Elizabeth Bishop stream from the presses, monographs devoted to
Hardy’s poetry have been appearing at the rate of just one a decade.6
The title of this book is taken from ‘The Voice’, which opens ‘Woman
much missed, how you call to me, call to me . . .’ (CP 346). It is focused on
3 Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (London: Routledge, 1973), 13.
4 Marjorie Levinson, ‘Object-Loss and Object-Bondage: Economies of Representation in
Hardy’s Poetry’, ELH 73 (2006), 550.
5 Philip Larkin, ‘Wanted: Good Hardy Critic’, in Required Writing (London: Faber & Faber,
1983), 168–74.
6 The most recent is Indy Clark’s Thomas Hardy’s Pastoral: An Unkindly May (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Clark’s is the first book published just on Hardy’s poetry since Tim
Armstrong’s outstanding Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2000).
Preface xv
she had grown passionately fond of Tommy almost from his infancy—said
to have been an attractive little fellow at the time—whom she had been
accustomed to take into her lap and kiss until he was quite a big child. He
quite reciprocated her fondness . . . In fact, though he was only nine or ten
and she must have been nearly forty, his feeling for her was almost that of
a lover. (L 23–4)
Around 1850, however, a conflict developed between the lady of the manor
and Hardy’s mother over young Tommy’s schooling which effectively
severed relations between the two, leaving Hardy torn, as he would be for so
much of his married life, between allegiance to his family and the attractions
and demands of a higher-born woman. The startling impact on the young
Hardy of Julia Augusta Martin’s attentions and caresses can be gauged from
his response to a letter that she wrote congratulating him on the publication
of Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874, by which time she was in her
sixties, and he was a married man of thirty-four:
She was now quite an elderly lady, but by signing her letter ‘Julia Augusta’
she revived throbs of tender feeling in him, and brought back to his
memory the thrilling ‘frou-frou’ of her four grey silk flounces when she
had used to bend over him, and when they brushed against the font as she
entered church on Sundays. He replied, but, as it appears, did not go to see
her. Thus though their eyes never met again after his call on her in London
[a disillusioning experience which occurred in 1862], nor their lips from
the time when she had held him in her arms, who can say that both
occurrences might not have been in the order of things, if he had
developed their reacquaintance earlier, now that she was in her
widowhood, with nothing to hinder her mind from rolling back upon her
past. (L 104–5)
xvi Preface
7 See the poems ‘Amabel’ (CP 8–9) and ‘The Revisitation’ (CP 191–5). The Poor Man and the
Lady was never published, and the manuscript was eventually destroyed. Extended sections of
it, however, were incorporated into Hardy’s first three published novels and a revised and trun-
cated version was published in the New Quarterly Magazine in 1878 as ‘An Indiscretion in the
Life of an Heiress’.
Preface xvii
peculiar about the poems discussed in this book. Hardy published just one
poem, ‘Ditty’ (dated 1870 and dedicated to E.L.G. (Emma Lavinia Gifford)),
that pays tribute to Emma in the three volumes that he issued when she was
alive, although a handful of others can be read as refracting aspects of their
marriage. All the other poems that make up his kaleidoscopic poetic
portrait of Emma, from her birth in Plymouth to her burial in Stinsford
churchyard, are necromantic forays into the past conducted by a man who
married his second wife some thirteen months after burying his first. Death,
in other words, was the portal through which Hardy gained imaginative
access to Emma’s emotions and experiences, as well as the source of his
compulsion to recreate her life. His discovery of her caustic diaries and of
her memoir Some Recollections in her attic room greatly fuelled this
compulsion.
There are numerous essays and articles on Hardy’s ‘Poems of 1912–13’
(see bibliography for a full listing), and excellent chapters on his poems
about Emma in various monographs on elegy and on Victorian and early
twentieth-century poetry, as well as in general studies of Hardy’s writings.8
This is the first book-length account, however, of the entire corpus of Emma
poems,9 as well as the first to pay attention to the role that poetry played in
their courtship, both as a shared passion—as illustrated by the first of my
epigraphs—and as a means of signifying his upward mobility. The majority
of Hardy’s poems about Emma are scattered across the four volumes that he
published between 1914 and 1925 (Satires of Circumstance, Moments of
Vision, Late Lyrics and Earlier, and Human Shows). Supplemented by much
contextual biographical material, these poems are here used to construct a
8 See in particular Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 227–59; Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of
Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994), 47–68; Melissa F. Zeiger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes
of Elegy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 43–61; Clifton R. Spargo, The Ethics of
Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004), 165–208; Peter Howarth, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 147–81; Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Desire:
Conceptions of the Self (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 164–91; Galia Benziman, Thomas
Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018),
133–61; John Hughes, The Expression of Things: Themes in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction and Poetry
(Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2018), 143–66.
9 The nearest precedent is Carl J. Weber’s edition of Hardy’s Love Poems (London:
Macmillan, 1963). This comes with an extensive introduction, but one that fully bears out
Larkin’s complaint that Weber was prone to ‘journalistic vulgarities’ (Larkin, Required Writing,
173). See also Unexpected Elegies: “Poems of 1912–13” and Other Poems about Emma, selected,
with an introduction by Claire Tomalin (New York: Persea Books, 2010).
xviii Preface
web of critical readings that enable the reader to grasp with a new fullness
the multifaceted complexity of his portrayals of his wife. Despite the ‘deep
division’ and ‘dark undying pain’ of the last years of their marriage (CP 380),
there can be no denying that Emma was utterly crucial to Hardy’s success
as a writer, serving as encourager and amanuensis and, on occasion, collab-
orator during his career as a novelist, and then as muse and source of
inspiration for the poems that he composed after her death. His obsessive
poetic recreations of the events of his first visit to St Juliot rectory, discussed
in detail in my Prologue, reveal how he figured the moment that she ‘opened
the door’ (CP 773) to him on the night of 7 March 1870 as the most import
ant of his life. It was a moment rivalled for him in significance only by that
of her death.
This book is in four sections of two chapters each. The first section
assesses the very particular meanings and possibilities that poetry embodied
for Hardy, and his attempts to describe and make sense of what he claims he
always considered his primary vocation. Some six weeks before he died,
Hardy’s second wife, Florence, recorded the following conversation:
Nov. 28. Speaking about ambition T. said today that he had done all that
he meant to do, but he did not know whether it had been worth doing.
His only ambition, so far as he could remember, was to have some poem
or poems in a good anthology like the Golden Treasury.
The model he had set before him was ‘Drink to me only’, by Ben
Jonson. (L 478)
This accords with the most high-romantic strains in Hardy’s own verse as
well as with his interest in, and talent for, lyrics that aim at the musical,
many of which he subtitled ‘Song’. He was also, however, acutely conscious
of the unlyrical aspects of the age in which he lived and, unlike, say,
Swinburne or Walter de la Mare (both of whose work he greatly admired),
Preface xix
10 ‘Horses Aboard’ (CP 785–6), ‘An East-End Curate’ (CP 713), ‘In a Waiting-Room’ (CP 470),
‘ “A Gentleman’s Second-Hand Suit’ ” (CP 883–4).
xx Preface
Dorchester in 1883 was undoubtedly one of the primary catalysts for the
eventual breakdown in their marital relations. Although being mistress of
Max Gate granted Emma a certain amount of power and status, she was
effectively condemned to live on Hardy’s terrain and forced to experience
on a regular basis the disapproval of his immediate family. Her letter of
February 1896 to Hardy’s sister Mary quoted at the beginning of Chapter 5
is the most signal instance of the anguish caused by proximity to Higher
Bockhampton. While it is not clear how Hardy experienced the complex
division of allegiances that resulted from his decision to settle permanently
on the outskirts of Dorchester, as far as his writing life went it proved such a
triumphant success that he was able, on the basis principally of the royalties
pouring in from Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), to give up writing fiction
and to devote himself to poetry.
The last section, ‘Afterwards’, deals with life after Emma. ‘Dear Ghost’
(Chapter 7) offers readings of various poems in which she appears to him as
a spectre and pays detailed attention to his reconfiguration of classical pre
cedents, in particular Virgil’s Aeneas and Dido and Ovid’s Orpheus and
Eurydice. It is here I consider the best-known of his elegies, such as ‘The
Voice’, ‘After a Journey’, and ‘At Castle Boterel’. And in my final chapter, after
outlining the various manoeuvres that resulted in Emma’s invitation to
Florence Dugdale to pay a series of extended visits to Max Gate in the sec-
ond half of 1910, I assess Hardy’s attempts to find a place for both ‘bright-
souled women’ (CP 415) in the poetic narrative of his life. His last extended
imaginative work, The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (begun
1916, completed 1923), transposes the menage à trois briefly attempted at
Max Gate into the love triangle played out between Sir Tristram and his two
Iseults, the Fair and the Whitehanded. Although Hardy can undoubtedly be
accused with some justice of missing Emma in life, the extended posthu-
mous pursuit of her traced in this book, culminating in her enthronement
in the Arthurian castle of Tintagel as the legendary Queen of Cornwall,
largely bears out the assertion that he made in a letter to Edward Clodd
some two weeks after her funeral: ‘One forgets all the recent years & differ-
ences, & the mind goes back to the early times when each was much to the
other—in her case & mine intensely much’ (CL IV 239).
Prologue
She Opened the Door
Of all the letters received and preserved by Thomas Hardy, it was a routine,
two-sentence communication from George Crickmay, the owner of an
architectural practice based in Weymouth, that had the most decisive effect
on his life: ‘Dear Sir,’ wrote Crickmay on 11 February 1870 to his freelance
employee:
Can you go into Cornwall for me, to take a plan and particulars of a
church I am about to rebuild there? It must be done early next week, and
I should be glad to see you on Monday morning. (L 66)
Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry. Mark Ford, Oxford University Press.
© Mark Ford 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192886804.003.0001
2 Woman Much Missed
take him. For the last leg he had to hire a trap that conveyed him the 16
miles from Launceston to the rectory at St Juliot, where he was to stay.
In real time Hardy found his fourteen or fifteen hours of stop-start
travelling merely ‘tedious’ (L 67). In poetic retrospect, however, this journey
came to assume the status of a legendary quest into a remote and magical
kingdom:
In the Life Hardy recalls that the ‘romantic sound’ of the name St Juliot had
struck his fancy the very first time that he heard it (L 66). It is not clear
whether he knew before his trip to Cornwall that the dilapidated church
he was to survey was only a few miles from the ruins of Tintagel, long
associated with the knights of the Round Table, and in particular with
the doomed lovers Tristram and Iseult, but certainly the mid-Victorian
fascination with all things Arthurian pervades a number of his recreations
of the momentous events of 7 March. Hardy was saturated in the poetry of
Tennyson, the first instalment of whose Idylls of the King had appeared in
1859, and it is likely that he was also familiar with Matthew Arnold’s
narrative poem ‘Tristram and Iseult’ of 1852.
‘Arrived at St. Juliot Rectory between 6 and 7,’ Hardy noted in his brief
diary entry for 7 March: ‘Received by young lady in brown’ (L 77). Although
Hardy and Emma were both twenty-nine, there was clearly an element of
exhilarating transgression in this first encounter. The Revd Caddell Holder
was in bed suffering from gout and his wife Helen, Emma’s older sister,
was ministering to him. ‘The dinner-cloth was laid,’ Emma recalled in
her memoir of her life up until she married Hardy, ‘my sister had gone to her
husband, who required the constant attention of his wife. At that very
Prologue: She Opened the Door 3
moment the front door bell rang and he [the architect] was ushered in.
I had to receive him alone, and felt a curious uneasy embarrassment at
receiving anyone, especially so necessary a person as the Architect. I was
immediately arrested by his familiar appearance, as if I had seen him in a
dream—his slightly different accent, his soft voice’ (SR 55).1 Emma also
noticed a blue paper sticking out of his pocket, which she assumed to be an
architectural drawing. She was surprised, however, to be informed that this
blue paper was not a plan of St Juliot Church, but the draft of a poem.
This was clearly an important gambit on Hardy’s part. When he revealed
the contents of that blue paper on that first evening, he was emphatically
signalling to the young lady in brown that there was more to him than met
the eye; that, despite his ‘rather shabby great coat’ and ‘business appearance’
(Emma initially wrote the rather more damning ‘homely appearance’) and
‘yellowish beard’, and the fact (not of course initially disclosed) that his
father was a mason in the building trade, he had a strong claim to be
considered a member of the same social class as his hostess: for he was a
reader, and even a writer, of poetry (SR 55).
Repairs to the church of St Juliot were long overdue. The Revd Caddell
Holder’s predecessor had initiated proceedings, and the first appeal had
been launched back in the 1850s. A preliminary inspection had eventually
been undertaken by Hardy’s first employer, John Hicks (a family friend of
Holder’s) in 1867; but Hicks’s death two years later meant a new assessment
had to be made, and new plans drawn up. There was, according to Emma,
much excitement in the parish when it was confirmed that the replacement
architect was finally scheduled to arrive: ‘It seemed almost wonderful that a
fixed date should at last be given and the work set in hand, after so many
years of waiting, of difficulties and delays,’ she recalled in her memoir (SR 52).
It must also surely have crossed the minds of all three residents of the
rectory that the long-awaited architect might possibly be a match for Emma,
whose chances of meeting a suitable husband, given her age and situation,
were exceedingly slim. No conclusive evidence of a plot to ‘ensnare’ Hardy
has emerged, but it may have been no coincidence that Holder was struck
down by gout just before the visiting architect’s arrival, leaving his sister-in-
law to welcome him alone.
----------------
1 The editors of Some Recollections explain that ‘square brackets indicate a word or words
added or substituted in the manuscript by Thomas Hardy’ and ‘words cancelled thus indicate a
cancellation that can certainly be attributed to Hardy’ (1).
4 Woman Much Missed
It was probably a servant rather than Emma herself who physically opened
the front door of the rectory to the visiting architect that evening; but the
moment of his first admission to Emma’s world furnished the dominant
image of the poem that, along with ‘When I Set Out for Lyonnesse’, most
fully acknowledges the profound transformation in Hardy that this meeting
would foster:
This poem was one of the many that poured from Hardy in the months after
Emma’s death. Unlike such as ‘The Going’ or ‘Your Last Drive’, it elides the
misunderstandings and antagonisms that afflicted the latter half of their
marriage, instead paying fervent tribute to the glorious possibilities ‘opened’
for Hardy by his relationship with Emma.
The first of these was the landscape of north Cornwall, to which he
returned again and again in his elegies for her, and where much of the
action of his third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, is set.2 In his 1895 preface to a
2 The plot of A Pair of Blue Eyes, as Hardy himself pointed out, prefigures that of Tess of the
d’Urbervilles (PBE 4). Its heroine Elfride Swancourt lives in a rectory in a fictional version of
St Juliot called Endelstow. She is initially attracted to a young visiting architect, Stephen Smith,
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Les notes manuscrites nous apprennent qu’il y a dans chaque
ksar un impôt et un seul ; celui qui doit permettre de subvenir aux
besoins des hôtes et des pauvres. Dans ce but tout individu valide
doit fournir une guessaa d’orge et quelques poignées de blé ; les
propriétaires de palmiers doivent une mesure déterminée de dattes
par groupes de cent palmiers (cette unité d’imposition — les cent
palmiers — porte le nom de mezrag). Il y a dans chaque ksar une
chambre commune où on emmagasine le produit de cet impôt en
nature pour y puiser le jour du besoin.
Auprès du ksar de Zeramra se dresse un tombeau de saint, aux
murailles duquel sont accotés des fagots. C’est la provision de bois
individuelle des habitants ; chacun y dépose la sienne parce qu’elle y
est en parfaite sécurité ; nul n’oserait en dérober un brin ; elle est
protégée efficacement par la crainte de ce saint particulier ; car ce
ne sont pas tous les saints en général qui ont le privilège de veiller
sur le bois à brûler. (Voir pl. XXXVI, phot. 67 et 68.)
Voilà donc un pays où la police est exercée par un tombeau, et
où le seul service public organisé est celui de l’assistance publique.
Ce sont deux détails charmants et touchants, et qui évoquent une
Salente. Si d’une vieille société défunte, dans quelques lignes de
fastes dépareillés, ces deux seules institutions avaient survécu, et
qu’on voulût à l’aide de ces fossiles uniques reconstituer tout le
corps social, on serait conduit à imaginer un peuple idéalement doux
et heureux, incarnation d’un rêve philanthropique. Elles font partie
intégrante de la société la plus violente et la plus misérable qui soit.
A Ougarta, les ksouriens invités à augmenter le débit de leurs
sources par un récurage facile, et dont ils reconnaissaient l’urgence,
suppliaient qu’on leur en donnât l’ordre, dût-on même n’en pas
surveiller l’exécution ; n’y ayant pas chez eux d’autorité d’où pût
émaner cette chose qui nous paraît si simple, un ordre administratif.
Curieux exemple d’imbécillité, d’aboulie sociale.
Les notes manuscrites donnent de curieux détails sur l’irrigation à
Beni Abbès, c’est-à-dire sur l’organisation de ce qui est la base
unique de la vie économique.
La grande source a un débit de 15 à 18 litres à la seconde ; il
faut y ajouter le débit, insignifiant il est vrai, de neuf petites
foggaras.
Cette masse d’eau est divisée en 41 parts, chacune d’un jour ou
d’une nuit. Ce nombre étant impair, ceux qui à la première tournée
ont eu l’eau de jour se trouvent à la seconde l’avoir de nuit et vice
versa.
Chaque part d’arrosage (journée ou nuit) est divisée en cinq
redjala (pluriel de radjel). — Et chaque radjel est divisé lui-même en
soixante habbas.
Prix courant du radjel : 200 francs ; de la habba : 3 fr. 33.
Il existe un répartiteur, qui s’appelle habbar, et qui est établi près
de la mosquée. Il mesure le temps au moyen du vase de cuivre
percé d’un trou qui est d’un usage courant à Figuig et ailleurs sous le
nom de karrouba, et qui porte ici le nom de tsirira, un sablier d’eau,
à cela près que l’eau entre goutte à goutte dans le récipient tandis
que le sable fuit grain à grain de notre sablier. La tsirira est un
bateau troué qu’on fait flotter sur un baquet et qui coule en un
temps donné. En été on compte 18 tsirira de jour et 13 de nuit. En
hiver c’est l’inverse. La tsirira s’emplit donc 31 fois en vingt-quatre
heures, ce qui fait l’unité de temps équivalente à 46 minutes 27
secondes.
Le répartiteur chargé de la tsirira réunit par la partie supérieure
autant de feuilles de palmier qu’il y a de propriétaires ayant droit à
l’eau dans la journée ou dans la nuit, et à chaque tsirira il fait un
nœud à une feuille. Dès qu’il y a à la feuille autant de nœuds qu’il
revient de tsiriras au propriétaire, le successeur de celui-ci, qui
assiste à l’opération, sort en courant du ksar et crie à son métayer
ou à son esclave, posté dans le jardin, d’y mettre l’eau.
La plus grande latitude est laissée aux propriétaires pour se
céder la totalité ou une partie de leur eau, ou pour changer de tour
de répartition.
La source étant située à quinze cents mètres environ de Beni
Abbès l’eau est amenée au moyen d’une séguia (canal à ciel ouvert).
La séguia vient-elle à se rompre hommes et femmes se précipitent
pour le réparer sur l’ordre de la djemaa. S’il y a dépense on la
répartit au prorata des droits de chacun.
Dans l’organisation vermoulue des oasis, la réglementation
traditionnelle de l’irrigation est apparemment ce qu’il y a de plus
solide et de plus respecté.
D’après Demontès[159] on a recensé dans l’annexe de Beni Abbès
6 469 habitants. Toute cette population parle arabe, exclusivement, à
partir de Beni Abbès, encore bien que les noms des ksars attestent
un vieux fonds berbère (Tametert, Timr’arin, etc.). Le long de l’oued
quand on vient du nord Mazzer est le dernier ksar où le berbère se
soit conservé.
[137] Se reporter à la carte en couleurs hors texte.
[138] Flamand, Aperçu général sur la géologie, etc., du bassin de l’oued
Saoura. Extrait des Documents pour servir à l’étude du Nord-Ouest
Africain, par Lamartinière et Lacroix, p. 37, etc.
[139] Voir carte Prudhomme. La montagne de sel a été vue, je crois,
par M. le capitaine Dinaux.
[140] Notons cependant l’existence, dans le laboratoire de géologie de
la Sorbonne, de clyménies envoyées par M. le lieutenant Bavière ;
elles proviennent, sauf erreur peu vraisemblable d’étiquette, de deux
points appelés Bou Maoud et Dkhissa, qu’on trouvera sur la carte à
l’intérieur de la chaîne. La présence en ces deux points du dévonien
supérieur est donc à peu près certaine. Ces clyménies, d’après M.
Haug, n’appartiennent pas au même étage que celles de Beni Abbès.
Il est évident que la chaîne d’Ougarta apparaîtra beaucoup moins
simple à mesure qu’on la connaîtra mieux.
[141] Est-ce un mot berbère ? faut-il le rapprocher du mot arabe qui
signifie noir ? la chaîne noire de Tabelbalet ? la première hypothèse
est de beaucoup la plus vraisemblable.
[142] A proximité de Beni Abbès, il y a là une question assez simple qui
pourrait tenter un officier du poste.
[143] M. le lieutenant Bavière a envoyé à la Sorbonne des clyménies qui
proviennent, sauf erreur, d’Ougarta et de Zeramra. La présence en
ces points du dévonien supérieur n’a certainement rien de surprenant.
Mais ces gisements de clyménies, que je n’ai pas vus, sont
nécessairement distincts des gisements à orthocères. Les schistes
marneux et les calcaires dans la sebkha d’Ougarta me paraissent au
contraire très susceptibles, d’après le facies, de contenir des
clyménies, quoique je n’en ai pas trouvé une seule.
[144] Voir Ém. Haug, Sur deux horizons à Céphalopodes du Dévonien
supérieur dans le Sahara Oranais (C. R. Ac. Sc., 6 juillet 1903).
[145] Haci Touil signifie « le puits profond ».
[146] Voir appendice VII (analyse du minerai).
[147] Voir appendice III.
[148] Notes manuscrites qui m’ont été communiquées au poste de Beni
Abbès par M. le capitaine Martin.
[149] Communication orale du Père de Foucault, le célèbre voyageur au
Maroc.
[150] On sait que Nazaréen est la traduction littérale de Nsara.
[151] Faidherbe, Langues sénégalaises, wolof, arabe, hassania, etc.
Paris, 1887.
[152] Les Touaregs du Niger portent ce nom de Gourdana ; ce sont, je
crois, les nègres qui le leur donnent en langue Sonr’aï. Y a-t-il là autre
chose qu’une simple coïncidence ?
[153] Bulletin du Comité de l’Afrique française, supplément du 15
janvier 1905.
[154] Voir là-dessus : Doutté, La Géographie, 1903, I, p. 185 et suiv.
[155] Depont et Coppollani, Les Confréries religieuses musulmanes, p.
501.
[156] Bulletin de la Société de Géographie d’Alger, 1904, p. 331.
[157] De Foucault mentionne un usage analogue. « La debiha est l’acte
par lequel on se place sous la protection perpétuelle d’un homme ou
d’une tribu. Cette expression a pour origine l’ancien usage, qui n’est
suivi aujourd’hui qu’en circonstances graves, d’immoler un mouton
sur le seuil de l’homme à qui on demande son patronage. » (De
Foucault, p. 130 ; voir aussi Bulletin du Comité de l’Afr. fr., suppl. de
janvier 1905, p. 20.)
[158] Communication orale du capitaine Martin, commandant l’annexe
de Beni Abbès, jadis officier de bureau arabe chez les Trafi. On
trouvera d’ailleurs l’idée développée dans : Bernard et Lacroix,
Évolution du Nomadisme.
[159] Bulletin du Comité de l’Afrique française, janvier 1903, p. 12.
CHAPITRE VI
G O U R A R A E T T O U A T [160]
Géologie du Gourara.
Le Gourara, comme la Saoura, et d’ailleurs comme le Touat, est
essentiellement une pénéplaine primaire, entrevue à travers les
déchirures d’un placage horizontal de terrains plus récents. Ces
derniers sont crétacés et mio-pliocènes.
Fig. 44. — Route directe entre Charouïn et O. Rached. — Échelle : 1/400 000.
(Bull. Soc. géol. Fr., 4e série, t. VI, p. 752, fig. 14.)
Géologie du Touat.
Hydrographie.