The Return of the Native | Page 2

has been a
bringing together of scattered characteristics.
The first edition of this novel was published in three volumes in 1878.
April 1912 T. H.

BOOK FIRST THE THREE WOMEN
I

A Face on Which Time Makes But Little Impression
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of
twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath
embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of
whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole
heath for its floor.
The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the
darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked.
In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night
which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come:
darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct
in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to
continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his
faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of the firmament
seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The
face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening;
it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the
frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a
moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.
In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into
darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and
nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at
such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its
complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours
before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true tale. The
spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night showed itself
an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be perceived in its
shades and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows
seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath
exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the
obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a
black fraternization towards which each advanced half-way.
The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other
things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and

listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it
had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises
of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last
crisis--the final overthrow.
It was a spot which returned upon the memory of 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 façade of a prison with far more dignity
than is found in the façade 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 thorough-going ascetic could