UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE
or
THE MELLSTOCK QUIRE
A RURAL PAINTING OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL
by Thomas Hardy


PREFACE


This story of the Mellstock Quire and its old established west-gallery
musicians, with some supplementary descriptions of similar officials in
Two on a Tower, A Few Crusted Characters, and other places, is intended
to be a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and
customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the villages of
fifty or sixty years ago.

One is inclined to regret the displacement of these ecclesiastical
bandsmen by an isolated organist (often at first a barrel-organist) or
harmonium player; and despite certain advantages in point of control and
accomplishment which were, no doubt, secured by installing the single
artist, the change has tended to stultify the professed aims of the
clergy, its direct result being to curtail and extinguish the interest of
parishioners in church doings. Under the old plan, from half a dozen to
ten full-grown players, in addition to the numerous more or less grown-up
singers, were officially occupied with the Sunday routine, and concerned
in trying their best to make it an artistic outcome of the combined
musical taste of the congregation. With a musical executive limited, as
it mostly is limited now, to the parson's wife or daughter and the school-
children, or to the school-teacher and the children, an important union