The Return of the Native | Page 4

those who loved it
with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of
flowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious
only with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than the
present. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve
a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness,
emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications
which frequently invest the facade of a prison with far more dignity
than is found in the facade of a palace double its size lent to this heath a
sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are
utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas, if
times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from, the mockery of a
place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of
surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler
and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which
responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.

Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is
not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe may be a
gaunt waste in Thule; human souls may find themselves in closer and
closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful
to our race when it was young. The time seems near, if it has not
actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a
mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the
moods of the more thinking among mankind. And ultimately, to the
commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards
and myrtle gardens of South Europe are to him now; and Heidelberg
and Baden be passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to the sand
dunes of Scheveningen.
The most thoroughgoing ascetic could feel that he had a natural right to
wander on Egdon--he was keeping within the line of legitimate
indulgence when he laid himself open to influences such as these.
Colours and beauties so far subdued were, at least, the birthright of all.
Only in summer days of highest feather did its mood touch the level of
gaiety. Intensity was more usually reached by way of the solemn than
by way of the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was often arrived at
during winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then Egdon was aroused
to reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the wind its friend. Then
it became the home of strange phantoms; and it was found to be the
hitherto unrecognized original of those wild regions of obscurity which
are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flight
and disaster, and are never thought of after the dream till revived by
scenes like this.
It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature--neither
ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame;
but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and
mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have
long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had
a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.
This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday. Its
condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary

wilderness--"Bruaria." Then follows the length and breadth in leagues;
and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of this
ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area of
Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. "Turbaria
Bruaria"--the right of cutting heath-turf--occurs in charters relating to
the district. "Overgrown with heth and mosse," says Leland of the same
dark sweep of country.
Here at least were intelligible facts regarding landscape--far-reaching
proofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untameable, Ishmaelitish
thing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilization was its
enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the
same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the
particular formation. In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of
satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in raiment of
modern cut and colours has more or less an anomalous look. We seem
to want the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of
the earth is so primitive.
To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between
afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the
world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the
whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around
and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars
overhead, gave ballast to