The BBC TV adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles looked attractive but wrecked the ending. On television, Tess and Angel Clare wander into Stonehenge in broad daylight, Tess drapes herself tragically on one of the stones, then the police arrive. In the book, they stumble into the stone circle at night, unaware of what they have found but overwhelmed by its sudden massive presence within the landscape:
'"It hums," said she. "Hearken!"
'He listened. The wind playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp . . .
'"A very Temple of the Winds,' he said."'
Sound is important in Thomas Hardy's novels because critical moments of narrative often turn upon what is left unsaid: the repressions, evasions and missed opportunities for openness that so often prove excruciating to a modern reader. What should be spoken is left silent, cannot be voiced, or by accident, is overlooked. Misunderstandings that follow always blossom into grim tragedies. At the climax of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess and Angel emerge out of darkness into the humming drone of Stonehenge. They stay and listen 'to the wind among the pillars', like two pagans momentarily isolated from the strictures of the world, then light dawns and society returns. The romantic idea of Stonehenge as a 'heathen temple', and the uncanny natural wildness of the sounds produced by aeolian harps combine to haunting effect, an echo of Coleridge's poem of 1795, The Aeolian Harp, in which he described the sound of the harp as 'a soft floating witchery of sound/as twilight Elfins make . . .' These were still powerful ideas in the late 19th century. To ignore them not only misses the drama of the scene, but loses the contrast between this eerie sounding and the disastrous silences of the past.