THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

by Thomas Hardy

Overview

BOOK ONE -- THE THREE WOMEN




1--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 halfway.

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 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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940012338259
Publisher:	SAP
Publication date:	03/20/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	347,139
File size:	375 KB

About the Author

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in the village of Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, a market town in the county of Dorset. Hardy would spend much of his life in his native region, transforming its rural landscapes into his fictional Wesses. Hardy's mother, Jemima, inspired him with a taste for literature, while his stonemason father, Thomas, shared with him a love of architecture and music (the two would later play the fiddle at local dances). As a boy Hardy read widely in the popular fiction of the day, including the novels of Scott, Dumas, Dickens, W. Harrison Ainsworth, and G.P.R. James, and in the poetry of Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and others. Strongly influenced in his youth by the Bible and the liturgy of the Anglican Church, Hardy later contemplated a career in the ministry; but his assimilation of the new theories of Darwinian evolutionism eventually made him an agnostic and a severe critic of the limitations of traditional religion.

Although Hardy was a gifted student at the local schools he attended as a boy for eight years, his lower-class social origins limited his further educational opportunities. At sixteen, he was apprenticed to architect James Hicks in Dorchester and began an architectural career primarily focused on the restoration of churches. In Dorchester Hardy was also befriended by Horace Moule, eight years Hardy's senior, who acted as an intellectual mentor and literary adviser throughout his youth and early adulthood. From 1862 to 1867 hardy worked in London for the distinguished architect Arthur Blomfeld, but he continued to study -- literature, art, philosophy, science, history, the classics -- and to write, first poetry and then fiction.

In the early 1870s Hardy's first two published novels, Desperate Remedies and Under the Greenwood Tree, appeared to little acclaim or sales. With his third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, he began the practice of serializing his fiction in magazines prior to book publication, a method that he would utilize throughout his career as a novelist. In 1874, the year of his marriage to Emma Gifford of St. Juliot, Cornwall, Hardy enjoyed his first significant commercial and critical success with the book publication of Far from the Madding Crowd after its serialization in the Cornhill Magazine. Hardy and his wife lived in several locations in London, Dorset, and Somerset before settling in South London for three years in 1878. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, Hardy published The Return of the Native, The Trumpet-Major, A Laodicean, and Two on a Tower while consolidating his pace as a leading contemporary English novelist. He would also eventually produce four volumes of short stories: Wessex Tales, A Group of Noble Dames, Life's Little Ironies, and A Changed Man.

In 1883, Hardy and his wife moved back to Dorchester, where Hardy wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge, set in a fictionalized version of Dorchester, and went on to design and construct a permanent home for himself, named Max Gate, completed in 1885. In the later 1880s and early 1890s Hardy wrote three of his greatest novels, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d'Urbevilles, and Jude the Obscure, all of them notable for their remarkable tragic power. The latter two were initially published as magazine serials in which Hardy removed potentially objectionable moral and religious content, only to restore it when the novels were published in book form; both novels nevertheless aroused public controversy for their criticisms of Victorian sexual and religious mores. In particular, the appearance of Jude the Obscure in 1895 precipitated harsh attacks on Hardy's alleged pessimism and immorality; the attacks contributed to his decision to abandon the writing of fiction after the appearance of his last-published novel, The Well-Beloved.

In the later 1890s Hardy returned to the writing of poetry that he had abandoned for fiction thirty years earlier. Wessex Poems appeared in 1898, followed by several volumes of poetry at regular intervals over the next three decades. Between 1904 and 1908 Hardy published a three-part epic verse drama, The Dynasts, based on the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. Following the death of his first wife in 1912, Hardy married his literary secretary Florence Dugdale in 1914. Hardy received a variety of public honors in the last two decades of his life and continued to publish poems until his death at Max Gate on January 11, 1928. His ashes were interred in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in London and his heart in Stinsford outside Dorchester. Regarded as one of England's greatest authors of both fiction and poetry, Hardy has inspired such notable twentieth-century writers as Marcel Proust, John Cowper Powys, D. H. Lawrence, Theodore Dreiser, and John Fowles.

Author biography from the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Far from the Madding Crowd.

Date of Birth:

June 2, 1840

Date of Death:

January 11, 1928

Place of Birth:

Higher Brockhampon, Dorset, England

Place of Death:

Max Gate, Dorchester, England

Education:

Served as apprentice to architect James Hicks