Tess of the d'Urbervilles

“ The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light which pervaded the open mead, impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within the boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England. Fair women are usually asleep at midsummer dawns. ”

“ Despite his heterodoxy Clare was a man with a conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life—a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which she was born. ”

“ This coolness in his relations distressed Clare less than it would have done had he been without the grand card with which he meant to surprise them ere long. To produce Tess, fresh from the dairy, as a D’Urberville and a lady he had felt to be temerarious and risky; hence he had concealed her lineage till such time as, familiarized with worldly ways by a few months’ travel and reading with him, he could take her on a visit to his parents, and impart the knowledge while triumphantly producing her as worthy of such an ancient line. ”

“ Tess’s heart quivered—he was touching her in a weak place. He had divined her chief anxiety. Since returning home her soul had gone out to those children with an affection that was passionate.
“If your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do something for them; since your father will not be able to do much, I suppose?”
“He can with my assistance. He must!”
“And with mine.”
“No, sir!”
“How damned foolish this is!” burst out d’Urberville. “Why, he thinks we are the same family; and will be quite satisfied!” ”

“ Then D’Urberville cursed and swore at her, and called her everything he could think of for the trick. Turning the horse suddenly he tried to drive back upon her, and so hem her in between the gig and the hedge. But he could not do this short of injuring her.
‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself for using such wicked words!’ cried Tess with spirit, from the top of the hedge into which she had scrambled. ‘I don’t like you at all! I hate and detest you! ”

“ Of this work of imagination poor Tess and her parents were naturally in ignorance—much to their own discomfiture; indeed, the very possibility of such annexations was unknown to them; who supposed that, though to be well-favoured might be the gift of fortune, a family name came by nature.
Tess still stood hesitating like a bather about to make his plunge, hardly knowing whether to retreat or to persevere, when a figure came forth from the dark triangular door of the tent. It was that of a tall young man, smoking. ”

“ His best novels prior to the appearance of Tess, are The Woodlanders, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, and The Mayor of Casterbridge. These four are the bulwarks of his reputation, while a separate and great fame might be based alone on that powerful tragedy called by its author Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Criticism which glorifies any one book of a given author at the expense of all his other books is profitless, if not dangerous. ”

“ Tess could hear the occupants of the cottage—gathered together after their day's labour—talking to each other within, and the rattle of their supper-plates was also audible. But in the village-street she had seen no soul as yet. The solitude was at last broken by the approach of one feminine figure, who, though the evening was cold, wore the print gown and the tilt-bonnet of summer-time. Tess instinctively thought it might be Marian, and when she came near enough to be distinguishable in the gloom surely enough it was she. ”

“ He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in Tess’s life as if they were vital features. It was for herself that he loved Tess; her soul, her heart, her substance—not for her skill in the dairy, her aptness as his scholar, and certainly not for her simple formal faith-professions. Her unsophisticated open-air existence required no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable to him. He held that education had as yet but little affected the beats of emotion and impulse on which domestic happiness depends. ”

“ Sometimes a wheel was off the ground, it seemed, for many yards; sometimes a stone was sent spinning over the hedge, and flinty sparks from the horse’s hoofs outshone the daylight. The aspect of the straight road enlarged with their advance, the two banks dividing like a splitting stick; one rushing past at each shoulder.
The wind blew through Tess’s white muslin to her very skin, and her washed hair flew out behind. She was determined to show no open fear, but she clutched d’Urberville’s rein-arm.
“Don’t touch my arm! We shall be thrown out if you do! Hold on round my waist!” ”

“ O, Tess, what’s the use of your playing at marrying gentlemen, if it leaves us like this!”
Accompanied by ’Liza-Lu and the boy, she again ascended the little lane which secluded the church from the townlet. As soon as they got into the street they beheld a man on horseback gazing up and down. “Ah—I’m looking for you!” he said, riding up to them. “This is indeed a family gathering on the historic spot!”
It was Alec d’Urberville. “Where is Tess?” he asked. ”

“ Tess was woman enough to realize from their avowals to herself that Angel Clare had the honour of all the dairymaids in his keeping, and her perception of his care to avoid compromising the happiness of either in the least degree bred a tender respect in Tess for what she deemed the self-controlling sense of duty shown by him, a quality which she had never expected to find in one of the opposite sex, and in the absence of which more than one of the simple hearts who were his housemates might have gone weeping on her pilgrimage. ”

“ I say in all earnestness that it is a shame for parents to bring up their girls in such dangerous ignorance of the gins and nets that the wicked may set for them, whether their motive be a good one or the result of simple indifference.”
Tess still did no more than listen, throwing down one globular root and taking up another with automatic regularity, the pensive contour of the mere fieldwoman alone marking her.
“But it is not that I came to say,” d’Urberville went on. “My circumstances are these. I have lost my mother since you were at Trantridge, and the place is my own. ”

“ The incline was the same down which D’Urberville had driven with her so wildly on that day in June. Tess went up the remainder of its length without stopping, and on reaching the edge of the escarpment gazed over the familiar green world beyond, now half veiled in mist. It was always beautiful from here; it was terribly beautiful to Tess to-day, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing. Life was totally changed for her forthwith. ”

“ O no! he can’t stomach old families!”
After hearing this caricature of Clare’s opinion poor Tess was glad that she had not said a word in a weak moment about her family—even though it was so unusually old almost to have gone round the circle and become a new one. Besides, another diary-girl was as good as she, it seemed, in that respect. She held her tongue about the d’Urberville vault and the Knight of the Conqueror whose name she bore. ”

“ Having mounted beside her, Alec d’Urberville drove rapidly along the crest of the first hill, chatting compliments to Tess as they went, the cart with her box being left far behind. Rising still, an immense landscape stretched around them on every side; behind, the green valley of her birth, before, a gray country of which she knew nothing except from her first brief visit to Trantridge. Thus they reached the verge of an incline down which the road stretched in a long straight descent of nearly a mile. ”

“ Love is dead in me, generosity, humanity, imagination is dead,—everything but one wild-beast passion; and I find myself panting as I read: “Get some money! Get some money! Hold on to it!”
—After a while I think suddenly: “And I am a poet!” That brings a moan from me and I sit shuddering.
March 7th.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles is one of the most unconvincing books I ever read. I neither believed in it nor cared about it in the slightest.
I am shown a “pure woman,” and by and by I learn, to my perplexity, that she has been seduced ”

“ In something less than an hour-and-a-half he had skirted the south of the King’s Hintock estates and ascended to the untoward solitude of Cross-in-Hand, the unholy stone whereon Tess had been compelled by Alec d’Urberville, in his whim of reformation, to swear the strange oath that she would never wilfully tempt him again. The pale and blasted nettle-stems of the preceding year even now lingered nakedly in the banks, young green nettles of the present spring growing from their roots. ”

“ Tess shook her head. But d’Urberville persisted; she had seldom seen him so determined; he would not take a negative.
“Please just tell your mother,” he said, in emphatic tones. “It is her business to judge—not yours. I shall get the house swept out and whitened to-morrow morning, and fires lit; and it will be dry by the evening, so that you can come straight there. Now mind, I shall expect you.” ”

“ It was not quite so far off as could have been wished; but it was probably far enough, her radius of movement and repute having been so small. To persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical degrees, parishes as counties, counties as provinces and kingdoms.
On one point she was resolved: there should be no more d’Urberville air-castles in the dreams and deeds of her new life. She would be the dairymaid Tess, and nothing more. ”

“ The youngsters, not immediately within sight, seemed rather bright and desirable appurtenances than otherwise; the incidents of daily life were not without humorousness and jollity in their aspect there. She felt a little as she had used to feel when she sat by her now wedded husband in the same spot during his wooing, shutting her eyes to his defects of character, and regarding him only in his ideal presentation as lover.
Tess, being left alone with the younger children, went first to the outhouse with the fortune-telling book, and stuffed it into the thatch. ”

“ It was Alec d’Urberville, whom she had not set eyes on since he had conducted her the day before to the door of the gardener’s cottage where she had lodgings.
“Upon my honour!” cried he, “there was never before such a beautiful thing in Nature or Art as you look, ‘Cousin’ Tess (‘Cousin’ had a faint ring of mockery) . I have been watching you from over the wall—sitting like Im-patience on a monument, and pouting up that pretty red mouth to whistling shape, and whooing and whooing, and privately swearing, and never being able to produce a note. ”

“ Thus, neither having the clue to the other’s secret, they were respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other’s character and mood without attempting to pry into each other’s history.
Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of her nature, and to her one more of his. Tess was trying to lead a repressed life, but she little divined the strength of her own vitality.
At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather than as a man. As such she compared him with herself ”

“ Mrs. D’Urberville was not the first mother compelled to love her offspring resentfully, and to be bitterly fond.
In spite of the unpleasant initiation of the day before, Tess inclined to the freedom and novelty of her new position in the morning when the sun shone, now that she was once installed there; and she was curious to test her powers in the unexpected direction asked of her, so as to ascertain her chance of retaining her post. As soon as she was alone within the walled garden she sat herself down on a coop, and seriously screwed up her mouth for the long-neglected practice. ”

“ In the latter aspect her d’Urberville descent was a fact of great dimensions; worthless to economics, it was a most useful ingredient to the dreamer, to the moralizer on declines and falls. It was a fact that would soon be forgotten—that bit of distinction in poor Tess’s blood and name, and oblivion would fall upon her hereditary link with the marble monuments and leaded skeletons at Kingsbere. So does Time ruthlessly destroy his own romances. ”

“ Perhaps Tess’s lineage had more value for himself than for anybody in the world besides.
Her perception that Angel’s bearing towards her still remained in no whit altered by her own communication rendered Tess still doubtful if he could have received it. She rose from breakfast before he had finished, and hastened upstairs. It had occurred to her to look once more into the queer gaunt room which had been Clare’s den, or rather eyrie, for so long, and climbing the ladder, she stood at the open door of the apartment, regarding and pondering. ”