Tess of the d’Urbervilles PDF - Thomas Hardy

 Table of Contents FROM THE PAGES OF TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES Title Page Copyright Page THOMAS HARDY THE WORLD OF THOMAS HARDY AND TESS OF THE D‘URBERVILLES Introduction TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES EXPLANATORY NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIFTH AND LATER EDI...

 Table of Contents FROM THE PAGES OF TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES Title Page Copyright Page THOMAS HARDY THE WORLD OF THOMAS HARDY AND TESS OF THE D‘URBERVILLES Introduction TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES EXPLANATORY NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIFTH AND LATER EDITIONS PHASE THE FIRST - THE MAIDEN I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI PHASE THE SECOND - MAIDEN NO MORE XII XIII XIV XV PHASE THE THIRD - THE RALLY XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII XXIV PHASE THE FOURTH - THE CONSEQUENCE XXV XXVI XXVII XXVIII XXIX XXX XXXI XXXII XXXIII XXXIV PHASE THE FIFTH - THE WOMAN PAYS XXXV XXXVI XXXVII XXXVIII XXXIX XL XLI XLII XLIII XLIV PHASE THE SIXTH - THE CONVERT XLV XLVI XLVII XLVIII XLIX L LI LII PHASE THE SEVENTH - FULFILMENT LIII LIV LV LVI LVII LVIII LIX ENDNOTES INDEX OF PLACES INSPIRED BY TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES COMMENTS & QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING  FROM THE PAGES OF TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES “Don’t you really know, Durbeyfield, that you are the lineal representative of the ancient and knightly family of the d‘Urbervilles, who derive their descent from Sir Pagan d’Urberville, that renowned knight who came from Normandy with William the Conqueror, as appears by Battle Abbey Roll?” (pages 11-12) Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some extent, despite the village school: the characteristic intonation of that dialect for this district being the voicing approximately rendered by the syllable UR, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech. The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word. (page 21 ) “You are mighty sensitive for a cottage girl!” (page 69) She knew how to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units. (page 106) Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake, and for what it brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed career. Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power. (page 147) She was no longer the milklnaid, but a visionary essence of woman—a whole sex condensed into one typical form. (page 160) The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming in their light summer attire, clinging to the roadside bank like pigeons on a roof-slope, that he stopped a moment to regard them before coming close. Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in the transparent tissue as in an aviary. Angel’s eye at last fell upon Tess, the hindmost of the four; she, being full of suppressed laughter at their dilemma, could not help meeting his glance radiantly. (pages 174—175) “I can’t bear to let anybody have him but me! Yet it is a wrong to him, and may kill him when he knows!” (page 217) Modern life stretched out its steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched the native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what it touched had been uncongenial. (page 226) “I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!” (page 276) In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire. (page 312) “You temptress, Tess; you dear damned witch of Babylon—I could not resist you as soon as I met you again!” (page 377) “It is too late.” (page 442)  Published by Barnes & Noble Books 122 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10011 www.barnesandnoble.com/classics Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented was serialized in The Graphic between July and December 1891, and published in volume form that same year. The present text is that of Hardy’s 1912 Wessex edition. Published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes, Biography, Chronology, Index of Places, Inspired By Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading. Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading Copyright © 2005 by David Galef. Note on Thomas Hardy, The World of Thomas Hardy and Tess of the d‘Urbervilles, Index of Places, Inspired by Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Comments & Questions Copyright © 2005 by Barnes & Noble, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Barnes & Noble Classics and the Barnes & Noble Classics colophon are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc. Tess of the d’Urbervilles ISBN 1-59308-228-2 eISBN : 978-1-411-43326-7 LC Control Number 2004116680 Produced and published in conjunction with: Fine Creative Media, Inc. 322 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10001 Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher Printed in the United States of America QM 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 FIRST PRINTING  THOMAS HARDY 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 Wessex. 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 for local groups). 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 traditional religion. Although Hardy was a gifted student at the local schools he attended as a boy for eight years, his lower-class origins limited 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 Blomfield, 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 use 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 southwest 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 place as a leading 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’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, all notable for their remarkable tragic power. The last 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 serials 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. THE WORLD OF THOMAS HARDY AND TESS OF THE D‘URBERVILLES 1840 The eldest of four children, Thomas Hardy is born on June 2 in Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester in the county of Dorset. His father, Thomas, is a builder and master stonemason ; his mother, Jemima, is a former domestic servant with literary interests who teaches her son to read at an early age. Hardy’s frail health prevents him from entering the village school until age eight. 1848 Hardy enters the newly established National School in his parish. His early reading includes Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, John Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, and many of the popular novelists and poets of the day. He cultivates his love of music, playing the fiddle with his father in the parish choir and at local dances. 1850 Jemima enrolls her son at school in Dorchester, where for the next six years he studies under a distinguished local schoolmaster, Isaac Last; he will begin the study of Latin at the age of twelve. 1856 After helping his father design renovations for a country church, Hardy is awarded an apprenticeship to Dorchester architect John Hicks. He studies Greek and other subjects in his free time and develops a close friendship with Horace Moule, a university- educated vicar’s son who becomes his mentor. 1862 Hardy leaves Dorset to work for a prominent architect, Arthur Blomfield, in London. While pursuing his professional duties, he attempts to develop his talents as a poet but fails to publish any poetry at this time. He visits museums , goes to the theater, takes French lessons, and attends a reading by Charles Dickens. 1863 Hardy develops a three-year romantic interest in Eliza Nicholls, who works as a personal maid for an upper-class family in London. He is awarded a prize from the Architectural Association for his design of a country mansion, and a Silver Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects for an essay on architecture. 1865 Hardy’s humorous prose sketch “How I Built Myself a House”  appears in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Several of his earliest surviving poems date from this time. 1867 Failing health necessitates a return to Dorchester, where Hardy again works for John Hicks. He writes his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady (authored by “the Poor Man”). 1869 The Poor Man and the Lady is rejected for publication because of its subversive depiction of English class relations. Hardy is given advice by George Meredith on writing fiction that will appeal to the Victorian public. He takes a position in Weymouth as an architect specializing in church restoration. 1870 Hardy meets his future wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, while on a trip to Cornwall, where he is sent to supervise the restoration of a small rural church. Emma lives with her sister and brother-in-law, the vicar of the church Hardy is restoring. 1871 Tinsley Brothers publishes the novel Desperate Remedies at Hardy’s expense and without the author’s name. The novel is barely noticed and sells poorly. 1872 Hardy moves back to London, where he creates architectural plans for schools. Emma’s father refuses to allow Hardy to marry her. Hardy publishes Under the Greenwood Tree with Tinsley; another novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, is serialized in Tinsley’s Magazine and the NewYork Tribune. 1873 Shortly after he begins work on Far from the Madding Crowd, to be serialized in the Cornhill Magazine, Hardy is devastated by the suicide of his old friend Horace Moule, whom he had visited in Moule’s rooms at Cambridge University a few months before. 1874 Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy’s first commercially successful novel, appears. Hardy and Emma Gifford marry in London and travel to France for their honeymoon. Over the next four years, Hardy and his wife will live in Dorset, Somerset, and London. 1878 The Return of the Native, set in the immediate environs of Hardy’s birthplace, is published, marking Hardy’s debut as a tragic novelist. The novel elicits mixed reviews, with some critics now recognizing him as one of England’s leading writers. Hardy and his wife settle  in London in the area of Wadsworth Common for three years. Hardy socializes with a number of writers in London. 1880 The Trumpet-Major, a historical novel set in the Napoleonic era, is published. Hardy suffers from an undiagnosed debilitating illness and is confined to bed for many months. During this time he dictates a novel, A Laodicean, to his wife. 1881 Hardy and his wife, their marriage strained, leave London for the town of Wimborne in Dorset. Hardy researches a novel on astronomy, to be titled Two on a Tower; it will be published in 1882. 1883 The Hardys move to Dorchester, where Hardy designs and begins construction of a house; his father and brother perform the construction work. 1885 The Hardys move into Max Gate, henceforth his permanent residence, a mile outside Dorchester and two miles from his birthplace; here he will write some of his greatest novels. 1886 The Mayor of Casterbridge is published (Casterbridge is Hardy’s name for Dorchester). Hardy sets about completing The Woodlanders, an unfinished narrative begun a decade earlier; the novel will appear in 1887. 1888 Wessex Tales, Hardy’s first collection of short stories, is published ; three more volumes of stories will follow. 1891 Tess of the d’Urbervilles appears in a bowdlerized version for serial publication in the Graphic, but is restored to the author’s intended version for book publication. Though the novel raises a storm of controversy for its treatment of marriage and religion, it is popular with the public. Many praise Hardy as England’s greatest novelist. 1892 Hardy’s father dies. Serialization of The Pursuit of the WellBeloved begins; it will be published in volume form as The Well-Beloved in 1897. 1893 On a trip to Dublin, Hardy meets Florence Henniker, with whom he will have a long-term literary and sentimental relationship. Marital troubles between Hardy and Emma are ongoing. 1895 Jude the Obscure is serialized in bowdlerized form in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, but is restored to its original form for book publication. Like Tess, Jude is highly controversial and precipitates harsh attacks for its alleged pessimism and immorality. Hardy turns to the writing of poetry; his first volume will appear in 1898. 1904 Hardy’s mother dies. The first part of The Dynasts, an epic poetic drama on the Napoleonic Wars, is published, with two more parts appearing over the next three years. 1912 Hardy receives the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature. Emma Hardy dies, inspiring the highly personal Poems of 1912-13. 1914 Hardy marries his longtime secretary, Florence Dugdale. The onset of World War I seems to confirm Hardy’s tragic philosophy of life, most recently dramatized in the The Dynasts and depicted in much of his poetry and fiction. 1919 Collected Poems is published. Three more volumes of poetry will appear during the last decade of Hardy’s life. 1920 Hardy is celebrated in England and abroad on his eightieth birthday. King George V and the Prime Minister send their greetings. 1928 Hardy dies of a heart attack on January 11 at Max Gate. His ashes are placed in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in London; his heart is buried next to the remains of his first wife, Emma, in Stinsford, outside Dorchester.  INTRODUCTION More than three-quarters of a century after Thomas Hardy’s death, the stamp he put on literature remains unmistakable. Just as readers talk about a Dickensian manner or a Conradian style, a Hardyesque outlook is instantly recognizable, where harsh circumstances seem to dictate what happens. Hardy’s world is rooted in nature and the countryside that he so lyrically describes, even as it is dying out and ushering in a colder, harder future. This state of affairs, which Hardy sums up with such authority, is evident in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which concerns the undoing of a pure-hearted woman. Though true tragedy is derived ultimately from character, Hardy’s fatalistic vision at times appears to dwarf individual actions. One early morning, on what will turn out to be a doomed trip to the market, Tess’s brother Abraham asks her about the stars: “Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?” “Yes.” “All like ours?” “I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted.” “Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?” “A blighted one” (p. 40). If novels contain their own guides for interpretation, one can do no better when reading Hardy than to look toward these powerful scenes. Christianity and its parables no longer serve the old purposes of communion and faith— note the blighted apples on the tree—but the perception of this problem doesn’t seem to help much: The tree of knowledge yields only bitter fruit for Hardy’s characters. Or as Hardy himself points out, in a commentary on love and chance: In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour of loving.... We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible (p. 53). These two excerpts not only proclaim Hardy’s philosophy but also display his two modes of narration: earthy storytelling and more abstract description. Life is hard, and love often plays cruel tricks, a state of affairs increasingly apparent to Tess. But to understand this state of affairs is no guarantee of satisfaction or even safety. A superior consciousness, especially in a woman, leads to alienation from one’s community, as in Hardy’s best-known novels: Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native, Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the d‘Urbervilles, and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure. In any event, Hardy always has a thesis to pursue, whether it’s the sorry state of matrimony or the plight of the rural poor. As a novelist, he portrays it through the predicament of real individuals. These depictions carry a brooding power, such as when Tess stumbles upon a grove with half-dead partridges and takes pity on them by breaking their necks: “Poor darlings—to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth in the sight o’ such misery as yours! ” (p. 327). Is Tess, wounded as she is, simply identifying with the birds and putting them out of their pain? Is she the counterpart of the innocent Edgar in King Lear, who cries, “O gods! Who is’t can say ‘I am at the worst’?” when he spies someone even worse off? Is the scene Hardy’s way of foreshadowing the murder that will follow? The semi-allegorical style is at times poetic, sometimes heavily didactic, infused with nineteenth-century Gothic melodrama yet also intellectual and psychologically probing, a prototype of what would eventually come to be known as Modernism. Hardy’s background suggests the dualities in the patterns of his fiction: the Victorian belief in social improvement versus a skepticism about the efficacy of reform; a love of the natural world versus the knowledge that nature is a mindless, impersonal system; and a nostalgia for previous eras despite the recognition that he himself probably would not have flourished back then. Born in 1840 and brought up in the rugged countryside of Dorset, which he turned into the Wessex of his fiction and poetry, Hardy became intimately acquainted with not just the local flora and fauna but seemingly every rise and bend in the region, or as Hardy mentions regarding Tess: “Every contour of the surrounding hills was as personal to her as that of her relatives’ faces” (p. 46). But Hardy went beyond the little village of Stinson near his home. The school he attended from age nine to sixteen was in Dorchester, 5 miles away, a distance that he walked back and forth daily. Thus, when he opens a scene with “It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours, attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they should be dried away to nothing” (p. 108), or describes how the “ripe hue of the red and dun kine absorbed the evening sunlight” (p. 128), the pictorial naturalism speaks with the authority of someone who’s done a great deal of traipsing through the southwest of England. In fact, Hardy also drew upon real towns and their citizens. Thus, Dorchester becomes Casterbridge, Marnhull is really Marlott, Sturminster-Newton turns into Stourcastle, Trantridge is suggestive of the real town of Pentridge, and so on. (See the Map of Wessex and the Index of Places in this edition.) Even during Hardy’s lifetime, commentators compiled descriptions and photos of “Hardy country.” Visitors still make pilgrimages to those towns and other landmarks, a surprising number of which have been preserved. Yet, living in the village of Higher Bockhampton near Stinson, Hardy grew up as many of the old rural ways were dying out: livelihoods, such as that of John Durbeyfield, described as a haggler or peddler; formerly independent businesses, such as inns, gradually taken over by franchises; and customs, such as May Day, a festival hearkening back to “when one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day” (p. 32); or simply the way John’s wife, Joan, makes a mirror in the country way, by hanging a sheet on the outside of a window. Taking longer to fade are attitudes, such as the timeworn view that a woman with a sexual past is “ruined”—but not a man. Hardy only half regrets the vanishing of old ways. After all, the small rural towns of England in the mid-nineteenth century formed a world in which the family washing was never quite done, drinking was the sole pastime for many, and the death of a horse meant the loss of a livelihood. When Tess is down on her luck, she hires herself out first as a dairymaid, then as a reed- puller, and finally as a digger for swedes, or rutabagas. These jobs involve hard manual labor, as well as cooperation among workers. Hardy describes the tasks in the kind of detail that a novelist uses when the readership may be only half acquainted with its rural past: singing at cows to coax a greater yield of milk, or how to draw straw from corn stalks. If Hardy is able to place us in a bygone world, in fact he had the same transporting effect on his contemporary readers; most were far removed from rural life. At the same time, the rigor and plod of agricultural work forms a comment on the condition of the rural poor. As with Dickens’s novels, Hardy’s writings— including an essay from 1883 called “The Dorsetshire Labourer”—led to social change. Hardy, after all, was born into a world both more genteel and more barbarous than ours, with aspects that shock us today, even as ours, with its blatant sexuality, would shock people then. Hardy couldn’t directly refer to the rape scene between Tess and Alec in the forest, and what little he hinted at disturbed many of his readers. Yet our own society, so inured to erotic display, is more offended by social injustice. Unfair as Hardy’s world seems, his citizens observe a certain decorum and a sense of charity that partly compensate for life’s inequalities. Like many other artists with vision, Hardy himself is poised between eras: the nineteenth century, with its old ways, fixed views, and trust in providence; and the twentieth century, with its progressive culture, powerful technology, and fading faith. In the middle of these poles is a lack of fixity and an insufficient attention to struggling individuals. It isn’t a particularly happy place, and anyone truly sensitive tends to feel alienated. As A. E. Housman (1859-1936) put it in one of his last poems: “I, a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made.” Moreover, even as country livelihoods are dying out, large-scale belief is also decaying. When Hardy wrote his novels, the slow erosion of faith often led people to stray from old tenets of morality and conduct, but nothing had replaced those old stays. In an earlier era dominated by the church, perhaps, people fit in better. By contrast, Hardy’s characters feel estranged from their fellow citizens—which doesn’t mean that family is the cure-all. To observe “Nature’s holy plan” (p. 31), a phrase from Wordsworth that Hardy uses sarcastically to describe the family unit, is to understand the tyranny of parents over their offspring: If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these half- dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with them—six helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield (p. 31). In a grim low burlesque scene that parallels this description, Hardy depicts a cornfield at harvest: Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when, their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they were huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones of the harvesters (p. 109). For all the glory of flora and fauna in his world, Hardy is more Darwinian than sentimentalist; he subscribes to the famous vision in Tennyson’s In Memoriam: “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” The universe is a pitiless place, with age-old patterns of behavior repeating themselves to extinction. But Hardy should not be condemned as a hopeless doomsayer. He is simply reflecting what the eminent Hardy critic Michael Millgate termed “the ancient pessimism of the rural poor” (Thomas Hardy: A Biography; see “For Further Reading”). Hardy notes in the novel: “As Tess’s own people down in those retreats are never tired of saying among each other in their fatalistic way: ‘It was to be’ ” (p. 91). One could just as well quote Thomas Hobbes’s famous view of human life: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. In any event, Hardy’s depictions of existential anguish, pragmatic and based on the rigors of experience, serve to highlight humanity’s plight, to draw attention to perceived injustice. When his characters suffer social ostracism, readers are supposed to protest, as they did in great numbers. Labeled a pessimist, Hardy told an interviewer that he preferred to be called a pessimistic meliorist: someone who believes in improvement while remaining gloomy about how much can be achieved. His novels speak out against unfair labor practices, sexual hypocrisy, and other double standards. What Hardy helped to spur, and was partly spurred by, was the questioning of set ways. Thus, Hardy’s novels reflect the birth of the social freethinker, the New Man and the New Woman: Angel Clare; Jude Fawley in Jude the Obscure, his eyes fixed on Christminster (Hardy’s stand-in for Oxford) and a living for a self-educated fellow like him; Sue Bridehead, who is independent enough to leave her husband; Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native, out of place in Egdon Heath; and to some extent Tess herself, questioning why she is the one who suffers in a tragedy of mythic proportions. All are linked by an awareness that something is wrong, gone, or not yet arrived, just as they also have visions of change, though in certain ways they are still emotionally tied to a vanishing world. For Tess, a great divide exists between the intellectual realization that she’s been wronged and the pulls of love and shame that almost rip her apart. That Alec d’Urberville has violated her is a sin she is forced to live with; that Angel Clare cannot love a woman so despoiled makes life unbearable for her; that she is the victim in this entanglement finally leads her to seek her own sort of justice—by committing an unredeemable act. Tess’s problem is half how society judges her; the other half is her own tortured consciousness. Her mother, who counseled her not to reveal the truth about her past, understands better than her daughter how society works. But Tess initially feels that she is somehow at fault, just as Jude the Obscure’s Sue Bridehead feels guilt at leaving her husband, whom she doesn’t love, and eventually returns to him as a sort of penance. This kind of shame is a product of social conditioning and not simply of human existence, yet society encompasses all but the most isolated of individuals, and the reader cannot simply nag Tess to ignore her training. As for culture and the human condition, the first can be ameliorated, as Hardy might put it, whereas the second cannot. Hardy particularly inveighs against the double standards of the time. The social code was different for men and women in the improprieties allowed (and still is, in most parts of the world). In the late 1800s, the figure of the New Woman, spirited and with an emancipated vision, emerged; but as Hardy portrays her, she is all too often stuck with an old conscience. Tess cannot stop blaming herself or stop loving Angel, even as she acknowledges that Alec took advantage of her innocence; and Angel, for all his talk of social progressivism, is a hypocrite. Moreover, if Angel Clare is the New Man, serving humanity, not God, with his “intellectual liberty,” he is still hamstrung by old ideas of maidenly virtue. To this extent, he presents an odd parallel to Tess: They are both independent thinkers who can’t sever their emotional ties to social conventions. Yet Tess is pure and loyal, even as her girlish spirits are wrecked by Alec’s assault. As Hardy observes her afterward, no sooner does she feel cheerful than “cold reason came back to mock her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness of her momentary pride would convict her, and recall her to reserved listlessness again” (p. 105). Walking in nature, she feels herself “a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence” (p. 107). Hardy also dissects Angel: Within the remote depths of his constitution, so gentle and affectionate as he was in general, there lay hidden a hard logical deposit, like a vein of metal in a soft loam, which turned the edge of everything that attempted to traverse it. It had blocked his acceptance of the Church; it blocked his acceptance of Tess (p. 286). The hard question is what can be changed and what remains unalterable. Modern psychology tells us that self-awareness is the first step to cure. Yet what Hardy’s characters learn about their situations doesn’t bring release but rather tortured consciousness, as Sophocles once showed in Oedipus the King. This is the tragic dimension of Hardy’s art, in which virtuous people are aware of what’s happening to them but are powerless to save themselves. The dilemma is partly situational—we live on a doomed star—and partly psychological: if only they could learn to live with themselves. Hardy plants emotional fixations in his characters: Tess’s adoration of Angel; Angel’s obsession with purity At times, Hardy will step away from the narrative action to comment, as if building a case history. Note how he describes his protagonist: Tess really wished to walk uprightly, while her father did nothing of the kind; but she resembled him in being content with immediate and small  achievements, and in having no mind for laborious effort towards such petty social advancement as could alone be effected by a family so heavily handicapped as the once powerful d’ Urbervilles were now (p. 130). And here Hardy sums up Angel: “His affection itself was less fire than radiance, and, with regard to the other sex, when he ceased to believe he ceased to follow, contrasting in this with many impressionable natures, who remain sensuously infatuated with what they intellectually despise” (p. 286). In character analyses like these, Hardy acts as a precursor to Freud, whose write-ups of his patients function as psychological narratives. As for Tess herself, she remains a complicated individual, though based on a type that had become a novelistic cliché, a maiden wronged. Two tentative titles for the novel were The Body and Soul of Sue (an earlier name for Tess) and Too Late, Beloved! The sub-title of the novel, often omitted nowadays, remains A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented. In fact, the situation that swallows up Tess was not that uncommon, given what little power a country girl had in such a situation. Real-life models are thought to derive from several women Hardy knew: a physical resemblance here, a girl who worked as a dairymaid there, and a recalled incident concerning an illegitimate child. Still, Tess herself is a work of art by Thomas Hardy. She has some education and can speak above the local dialect, having passed the Sixth Standard at school. In addition, she has a temper, as she shows in the scene where Alec tries to scare her by riding furiously down the hill to Trantridge with her. Even when Alec rides with her to the forest, she does not succumb without full protest, though it takes love to complete her martyrdom. When the second advent of Alec causes her to miss a last chance at happiness, the vengeance she takes is swift and terrible. That Tess eventually kills for love, so to speak, bothered many contemporary readers. Yet as Hardy wrote in a December 1891 letter to H. W. Massingham, “the doll of English fiction must be abolished, if England is to have a school of fiction at all.” As Hardy portrays her at the outset, Tess is a comely young woman of sixteen, though she retains a few childlike aspects. Yet as the eldest of seven surviving children, she has a caretaker role toward her siblings. As Angel sees her, she is like a daughter of Nature, a picture of such innocence that Hardy uses her as a stand-in for Eve, when she and Angel are the first persons up in the mornings at the dairy. Still, her mother describes her as an “odd maid.” She is also tried beyond her years and eventually becomes a creature of despair. For much of the novel, she vacillates between numbness and bitterness. Her refrain is “I wish I had never been born,” echoing the line the chorus utters in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus: “Never to have been born is much the best.” Religion is of little comfort. Reflecting on her wretched state, she thinks of the opening verse from Ecclesiastes in the Bible, “All is vanity” : She repeated the words mechanically, till she reflected that this was a most inadequate thought for modern days. Solomon had thought as far as that more than two thousand years ago; she herself, though not in the van of thinkers, had got much further. If all were only vanity, who would mind it? All was, alas, worse than vanity—injustice, punishment, exaction, death. The wife of Angel Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt its curve, and the edges of her eyesockets perceptible under the soft skin, and thought as she did so that a time would come when that bone would be bare. “I wish it were now,” she said (p. 325). In a later scene, after confronting Alec in the d’Urberville ancestral crypt, she wonders why she is with the living rather than with the family corpses—on the wrong side of the vault door, as she puts it. Yet tragedy is universal, and Tess is by no means the world’s first victim. To a modern audience, her plight may even seem quaint, with readers assuring themselves that they would have told off both Alec and Angel in no uncertain terms. One must return to a time when virtue for an unmarried woman meant to be virgo intactus (literally, “an untouched virgin”). Just as important, one must project oneself into the mind of Tess, wracked by guilt over a crime she didn’t commit. As Hardy notes: “Let the truth be told—women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there’s life there’s hope is a conviction not so entirely unknown to the ‘betrayed’ as some amiable theorists would have us beheve” (p. 130). Yet Tess has still to meet Angel and become love-struck over a man who marries and then rejects her. Perhaps she could straighten up from this cruel twist as well, but she won’t let herself. The ancient Roman fabulist Ovid put it best when he rewrote Virgil’s line “Love conquers all” to imply an experience more soul-rending than uplifting: “Love is a kind of warfare.” In any event, something tortured resides in Tess. Though some commentators have termed such an outlook a type of female masochism, Tess derives no pleasure of self-denial from her experience. Rather, an aura of extreme humility hangs about her, to the point of irritating the reader—though less so in Hardy’s day, when proper comportment for young women dictated a modesty that we might deem repressive. In fact, to some extent, Tess resembles a saint, with an echo of allegorical figures like Chaucer’s patient Griselda, who endures myriad rejections from her husband before she is welcomed back. By the time Tess meets Angel for the last time, she has practically completed her self-abnegation. She has become like Job in the Bible, though Job remains a holy servant, whereas Tess finds no consolation in faith. Nor does she receive any reward, and reconciliation for her arrives too late. As for the others in the novel, they range from duty-bound souls to churls and rascals, with some in between. One of the joys in reading Hardy is encountering regional characters, such as Mrs. Rolliver, who illegally serves liquor at her off-license establishment under the pretext that it’s a private club; or Dairyman Crick, whose Sunday finery is comically at odds with his farm clothes. Three of the dairymaids at his farm, Marian, Izz Huett, and Retty, form a cross-section of the rural labor force; they are also a trio in love with Angel Clare, as well as Tess’s confidantes. And since personality comes not just from environment but also from heredity, it’s edifying to see the two adults who reared the protagonist. Tess’s father, John Durbeyfield, an old- fashioned peddler, hearing that he’s a descendant of the d’Urberville line, boasts that his family mausoleum has the best skeletons around. As for his wife, Joan, who passes on rural songs, sayings, and other lore, she too represents a vanishing past. Hardy is also fine on country eccentrics, such as the religious sign-painter who inscribes a biblical verse on a stile that seems to speak directly to Tess. Hardy’s country folk are his equivalent of the chorus in classical Greek drama, echoing the popular ethos of the day. They caution against intemperance even as they fall into it. They work hard and feel keenly. They are the stuff of life, the people Hardy grew up with in Dorset. The style in which Hardy delineates his people and their predicaments is admittedly somewhat melodramatic, but smells of reality. Tess is a powerful mixture of love and disunity, Gothic overtones and allegory, but with a whiff of psychology that transcends stereotypes. Yet the term realism is slippery, as Hardy himself observes in his 1891 essay “The Science of Fiction” (reprinted in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice), where he claims, “Realism is an unfortunate, an ambiguous word.” So many eras of artists have claimed that their style—Renaissance, Romantic, or Modernist—accurately represents the real world. A more balanced claim would be that there are myriad ways of getting at reality. Hardy had many models upon which to draw, from Greek drama to medieval allegory, Romantic verse, and Gothic novels. When Alec is identified by the red coal of his cigar at a dance, when he is linked to the image of a serpent, or simply when he calls himself “a damn bad fellow” (p. 97), Hardy imbues him with the aspects of the devil. In a later scene between him and Tess, Hardy rigs the effects: “The fire flared up, and she beheld the face of d’Urberville” (p. 406). Just in case the reader misses the supernatural associations, when Hardy arranges Alec’s death his blood pools in the shape of an ace of hearts. Admittedly, such imagery can seem contrived at times. Yet Hardy is also adept at fusing naturalism with symbolism, so that the representation is simply a piece of life with a haunting suggestive force, and this technique is one early hallmark of Modernism. One scene that many readers recall long after they finish the novel describes a host of small field animals doomed by a mechanical reaper, a fearsome vision of automated death that presages the eventual destruction of the countryside. Yet the massacre is occasioned by a harvest that will feed the human populace, and the harvesters themselves administer the killing blows with sticks and clubs. This type of symbol is more open-ended than metaphors that employ direct equivalence, and moreover seems to appear not because of authorial contrivance but rather because life itself throws up odd parallels. Similarly, when Tess gathers the buds called “ladies and lords” (from Jack-in-the-pulpit flowers), the act coincides with Angel’s discussing the pastoral life in ancient Greece, which puts Tess in mind of her similarity to the Bible’s forlorn Queen of Sheba. While Angel continues to talk of book-learning, she peels each bud to see whether inside it is a “lady” or a “lord” and concludes “There are always more ladies than lords” (p. 155)—which functions as a more profound comment on the English pastoral and women’s marital prospects than any lecture on Greek history. Love also has nastier repercussions, epitomized in a tale told by Dairyman Crick about a girl’s angry mother who goes after an errant man with an umbrella and then squeezes him in a butter churn: a half- angry, half-comic sexual metaphor. Other comparisons are less graceful, such as when Tess baptizes her dying baby, christening it “Sorrow.” Still, allegories are not always heavy-handed; moreover, they can shift ground, depending on perspective. For instance, after Alec’s spiritual conversion, Tess moves from a pure woman to a temptress, an embodiment of the Flesh—at least to Alec. The most satisfying allegories are drawn from human nature, an endless repository of material. For his plotting, Hardy borrows large-scale patterns from melodramatic authors like William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882), a Lancashire novelist who wrote Gothic narratives in English settings. An underlying intent is to present a lesson. Hardy’s tendency toward commentary is similar to that of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) and Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)—that is, in the middle of describing an event, he will step out of narration to present an essay on good and evil: Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order (p. 91). Other passages in the novel display equally sententious rhetorical questions regarding life and love, fate and fortune. Hardy, who once thought of becoming a parson, has a tendency to preach. He also relies on thick foreshadowing, such as when the sleepwalking Angel unwittingly puts Tess in a coffin. One of Hardy’s writing techniques is to start with a description of the land, as in the portrait of Marlott—“a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the summits of the hills that surround it” (p. 17)—and then focus on the figures in it, in this instance the May Day celebrants. The move from panorama to close focus is a standard element in Romantic poetry or in cinematic art, for that matter. But this descriptive mode is only one part of a novelistic craft that, for all its sensuous lyrical passages, is as solidly constructed as a house. At age sixteen, Hardy became an apprentice architect, and his prose shows evidence of that skill. His plots are built upon cause and effect, with an occasional divergence into coincidence, a borrowing from Victorian melodrama—as shown in the very section tides of Tess: “Phase the First,” “The Woman Pays,” and so forth. A study of Hardy’s letters and literary journal shows that he read and admired a wide variety of authors, from the Greco-Romans to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), though with some disdain for the magazine fiction of his time, which he considered too straitlaced and insincere (see his 1890 essay “Candour in English Fiction,” reprinted in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice). He has an autodidact’s zeal for displaying erudition combined with a country man’s love of his native experience. To put it another way: At times Hardy is a hybrid of earthiness and Henry James. For instance, when Tess reveals her secret shame to Angel, Hardy records that “each diamond on her neck gave a sinister wink like a toad’s” (p. 268), but after: “When she ceased the auricular impressions from their previous endearments seemed to hustle away into the corners of their brains, repeating themselves as echoes from a time of supremely purblind foolishness” (p. 271). This type of literary impressionism doesn’t quite trust its readers to infer from discrete particulars and therefore includes the anticipated effects, as well. The fiction of Conrad works similarly in that regard. In his preface to the Wessex edition of Tess in 1912 (see below), Hardy states his intent to be not aggressive or didactic but merely representative, giving more impressions than convictions. In his 1888 essay “The Profitable Reading of Fiction” (in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice), he claims that “the didactic novel is so generally devoid of vraisemblance as to teach nothing but the impossibility of tampering with natural truth to advance dogmatic opinions.” This declaration is apt, but advice that Hardy didn’t always follow On the other hand, many writers put forth dicta that represent their aesthetic ideals rather than what they themselves always follow, and the student of literature would do well to heed D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) in his cautionary words: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.” Tess was originally published serially in the Graphic, the Fortnightly Review, and the National Observer. Family magazines were squeamish about anything sexually indecorous and forced Hardy to alter accordingly, from deleting the implied rape scene to having Angel use a wheelbarrow to carry the milkmaids over the ditch rather than hoist them over himself The serial format and the structure it encourages also theoretically allow the author to make alterations according to audience reaction, but in fact Hardy had the manuscript ready before even the first installment was published. The first edition of Tess was published in three volumes in December 1891, followed by a second edition in 1892, then one in 1895 with many earlier cut passages restored. The prefaces that accompany each edition serve in part to defend the author against charges of blasphemy and indecency: the crude way Alec treats Tess, for instance, or Hardy’s caustic mention of “the President of the Immortals” (see p. 465), which is in fact a reference from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. But as Hardy is at pains to make clear in 1891, Tess is “an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things” (p. 3). A year later, in his second preface, still defending himself, he maintains that “a novel is an impression, not an argument, and there the matter must rest” (p. 6). In any event, the enduring value of the novel rather than a few critical detractors eventually decided the issue, and the Wessex edition, uniform with the rest of Hardy’s work, accorded the novel canonical status. As Hardy notes, it includes a few additional pages that were excised from the manuscript, mainly having to do with the description of female anatomy in chapter X. This edition of the novel is a reprinting of the 1912 Wessex edition. Where do Hardy’s sympathies lie? Certainly he raises significant social issues, and for all his protestations against didacticism, most readers become exercised about the moral questions involved and engage with Hardy’s arguments. In many ways, Hardy may be considered a proto-feminist, despite some stereotypical pronouncements about women. As he describes Tess, for instance: “It would have denoted deficiency of womanhood if she had not instinctively known what an argument lies in propinquity,” and he refers to the “intuitive heart of woman” (p. 289). But in the areas where it counted, such as giving women fair treatment, Hardy held liberal views. The social code that shames Tess after Alec impregnates her, for instance, is a double standard that clearly doesn’t apply to males, let alone men of a higher class. The most poignant instance of such unfairness is Angel’s inability to accept Tess’s sexual past, though he’s committed a voluntary indiscretion of his own. Like many writers before him, John Milton included, Hardy also has a less than rosy view of marriage: two individuals yoked together under the law and chafing under the constraints. Hardy demonstrates this prickly truth in the recriminations of a wife whose husband has been a clumsy dancer: “You shall catch it for this, my gentleman, when you get home!” (p. 80). He also shows it in scenes from Joan and John Durbeyfield’s glum household. Hardy’s own marriages, first to Emma Lavinia Gifford and later to Florence Dugdale, may have had something to do with the gloomy marital scenarios in his fiction. But Hardy has a point to make about society, not merely a personal grudge. Marriage confers only social respectability, with all too often hypocrisy beneath. For instance, Tess’s mother tells her to say nothing about her past, and later calls her a fool for telling her husband. Given the society in which they live, she may well be right. The inexorable rules of logic and nature are what Hardy respects and sometimes fears, but he feels no such regard for cultural dictates. Tess herself at one point is ashamed for feeling despondent over her condition, “based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature” (p. 327). The division between natural and social law is a theme that Hardy repeatedly exposes in his novels, whether it involves a man who deserts his wife in The Mayor of Casterbridge or a woman who dies in childbirth, her unacknowledged stillborn baby buried with her, in Far from the Madding Crowd. Hardy’s characters suffer keenly, but the novels at least point toward the possibility of a kindlier spirituality in place of the hard old verities. To this end, Hardy depicts some cruel absolutes but by implication espouses relativity and all it represents. With Tess as a vehicle, Hardy declares: “Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized” (p. 347). He goes even further in declaring that what one knows and feels forms the substance of one’s life, “for the world is only a psychological phenomenon” (p. 106). Though this view stems partly from Hardy’s reading of philosophers like Schopenhauer, its appearance in a nineteenth-century novel was as daring in its way as the sexual material that offended some readers: showing Alec’s feeding Tess a strawberry, his hand at her mouth, for instance, or presenting a heroine who has a child out of wedlock. These novelistic choices of material and focus have much to do with Hardy’s singular outlook: an iconoclastic slant looking downward. He learned self-reliance at an early age. Educated in the classics, he shows in his writing not only Greek and Latin references but also a classical temperament, unsparing and unsentimental. His agnosticism was based on hard observation and lack of consoling inference. For him, the religious worldview no longer served its old purposes of explanation and consolation. In his well-known poem “Hap,” he blames crass casualty, or mere happenstance, for slaying joy in the world. In Tess, when one of Hardy’s rural eccentrics paints a biblical verse on a stileboard, the authorial voice declares, “Some people might have cried, ‘Alas, poor Theology!’ at the hideous defacement—the last grotesque phase of a creed that had served mankind well in its time” (p. 100). Later, when Tess is staying late to help harvest a field, the moon appears like “the outworn gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten Tuscan saint” (p. 114). Clearly, for Hardy, the old sacred order has decayed. Yet Hardy at times nourished a belief in fatalism, and sometimes in a world force deemed the immanent Will, borrowed from Schopenhauer. Like James Joyce (1882-1941) and other artists brought up in a faith that they later rejected, Hardy still uses religious props for symbols, but without the undergirding belief, and with a mix of polytheism and Judeo-Christianity. A few larger questions remain. If Hardy was unhappy in his own age, where did he seek solace? Though the past was more secure, “when faith was a living thing” (p. 138), that state derived from mass conformity. Yet Hardy mentions “the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power” (p. 147). The future bodes even worse. In Jude the Obscure, a child called Little Father Time obsesses so much about overpopulation that he kills himself and his siblings. Hardy’s lifetime (1840—1928) was a period of dislocation, both good and bad. Many ideas in Hardy’s work derive from Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), and Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), among other scientists and social engineers. To cite one instance in Tess: Hardy is concerned with so-called devolution, as in the degeneration of lineage from the aristocratic d‘Urberville to the lower-class Durbeyfield. As Dairyman Crick describes it, Angel harps on the subject of old families who have come down in the world, including, for an authorial “in” joke, the Hardys (see p. 156). On the other hand, those like the current d’Urbervilles, who bought out a family name, are merely rich opportunists. Regarding the events that befall Tess, as with the doomed lovers in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, one can point to all the old causes: family, fate, and fortune. To tie these factors together may simply be to note that character is destiny, as so memorably captured in Greek tragedy. Does this mean that Hardy’s outlook is essentially tragic? In Tess he mentions “the tragic mischief” of Tess’s drama, stating at Tess’s first meeting with Alec, “Thus the thing began” (p. 53). The theme of belatedness runs throughout Hardy, with missed chances and grave consequences. As Angel tells Tess, “This hobble of being alive is rather serious” (p. 153). Yet worse than misfortune is the desolation that follows, to the point of numbness: apathy on Tess’s part and neglect on the part of others. Perhaps the cruelest words in nineteenth-century literature occur in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, in which Jude Fawley wishes for someone to guide him, “But nobody did come, because nobody does.” Or, as Hardy puts it in Tess: “The world’s concern at her situation—was founded on an illusion” (p. 113). Hardy’s poem “Tess’s Lament” dwells principally on his heroine’s early sense of self-blame—“And it was I who did it all, / Who did it all; ’Twas I who made the blow to fall / On him who thought no guile”—and subsequent wish for oblivion—“I cannot bear my fate as writ, / I’d have my life unbe” (see The Complete Poems). Yet something abides in Hardy’s characters: the human spirit. In a poem written during World War I, “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations,’ ” in quest of some everlasting truths, Hardy depicts what will last after the strife: 1 Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. 2 Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass. 3  Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by: War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die. The poem places its faith in human endurance and in the perpetual events of sowing, reaping, and love to start the cycle again. Transcendence does not appear much in Hardy’s work, but then neither does it occur often in life. Nonetheless, there are moments, such as when a host of nighttime revelers, tipsy with wine after dancing, head home with moonlight halos cast on all, when humanity seems one with nature. Such is life; such is Hardy’s vision. Or as Hardy states during Angel’s change of heart near the end: “No man can be always a cynic and live” (p. 398). David Galef has published nine books: the novels Flesh and Turning Japanese; two children’s books, The Little Red Bicycle and Tracks; two translations of Japanese proverbs, Even Monkeys Fall from Trees and Even a Stone Buddha Can Talk; a work of literary criticism, The Supporting Cast; an edited anthology of essays called Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading; and, most recently, the short-story collection Laugh Track. In addition, he has written more than seventy short stories for magazines ranging from the British Punch to the Czech Prague Revue, the Canadian Prism International, and the American Shenandoah. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Newsday, the Village Voice, Twentieth Century Literature, The Columbia History of the British Novel, and many other places. His awards include a Henfield Foundation grant, a Writers Exchange award from Poets & Writers, and a Mississippi Arts Council grant, as well as residencies at Yaddo and Rag-dale. He is a professor of English at the University of Mississippi, where he also administers the M.F.A. program in creative writing. Map of Wessex, prepared by Hardy in 1895.  TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed Shall lodge thee. —W SHAKESPEARE 1  EXPLANATORY NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION THE MAIN PORTION OF the following story appeared—with slight modifications—in the Graphic newspaper; other chapters, more especially addressed to adult readers, in the Fortnightly Review and the National Observer, as episodic sketches. My thanks are tendered to the editors and proprietors of those periodicals for enabling me now to piece the trunk and limbs of the novel together, and print it complete, as originally written two years ago. I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose, as an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and in respect of the book’s opinions and sentiments, I would ask any too genteel reader, who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St Jerome’s: If an offence come out of the truth, better it is that the offence come than that the truth be concealed.1 November 1891 T.H.  AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIFTH AND LATER EDITIONS THIS NOVEL BEING ONE wherein the great campaign of the heroine begins after an event in her experience which has usually been treated as fatal to her part of protagonist, or at least as the virtual ending of her enterprises and hopes, it was quite contrary to avowed conventions that the public should welcome the book, and agree with me in holding that there was something more to be said in fiction than had been said about the shaded side of a well- known catastrophe. But the responsive spirit in which Tess of the d’Urbervilles has been received by the readers of England and America, would seem to prove that the plan of laying down a story on the lines of tacit opinion, instead of making it to square with the merely vocal formulae of society; is not altogether a wrong one, even when exemplified in so unequal and partial an achievement as the present. For this responsiveness I cannot refrain from expressing my thanks; and my regret is that, in a world where one so often hungers in vain for friendship, where even not to be wilfully misunderstood is felt as a kindness, I shall never meet in person these appreciative readers, male and female, and shake them by the hand. I include among them the reviewers—by far the majority—who have so generously welcomed the tale. Their words show that they, like the others, have only too largely repaired my defects of narration by their own imaginative intuition. Nevertheless, though the novel was intended to be neither didactic nor aggressive, but in the scenic parts to be representative simply, and in the contemplative to be oftener charged with impressions than with convictions, there have been objectors both to the matter and to the rendering. The more austere of these maintain a conscientious difference of opinion concerning, among other things, subjects fit for art, and reveal an inability to associate the idea of the sub-title adjective with any but the artificial and derivative meaning which has resulted to it from the ordinances of civilization. They ignore the meaning of the word in Nature, together with all aesthetic claims upon it, not to mention the spiritual interpretation afforded by the finest side of their own Christianity. Others dissent on grounds which are intrinsically no more than an assertion that the novel embodies the view of life prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century; and not those of an earlier and simpler generation—an assertion which I can only hope may be well founded. Let me repeat that a novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest, as one is reminded by a passage which occurs in the letters of Schiller to Goethe on judges of this class: “They are those who seek only their own ideas in a representation, and prize that which should be as higher than what is. The cause of the dispute, therefore, lies in the very first principles, and it would be utterly impossible to come to an understanding with them.” And again: “As soon as I observe that any one, when judging of poetical representations, considers anything more important than the inner Necessity and Truth, I have done with him.”1 In the introductory words to the first edition I suggested the possible advent of the genteel person who would not be able to endure something or other in these pages. That person duly appeared among the aforesaid objectors. In one case he felt upset that it was not possible for him to read the book through three times, owing to my not having made that critical effort which “alone can prove the salvation of such an one.” In another, he objected to such vulgar articles as the Devil’s pitchfork, a lodging-house carving knife, and a shame- bought parasol, appearing in a respectable story. In another place he was a gentleman who turned Christian for half-an-hour the better to express his grief that a disrespectful phrase about the Immortals should have been used; though the same innate gentility compelled him to excuse the author in words of pity that one cannot be too thankful for: “He does but give us of his best.”2 I can assure this critic that to exclaim illogically against the gods, singular or plural, is not such an original sin of mine as he seems to imagine. True, it may have some local originality; though if Shakespeare were an authority on history, which perhaps he is not, I could show that the sin was introduced into Wessex as early as Heptarchya itself. Says Glo’ster in Lear, otherwise Ina, king of that country: As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.3 The remaining two or three manipulators of Tess were of the predetermined sort whom most writers and readers would gladly forget; professed literary boxers, who put on their convictions for the occasion; modern “Hammers of Heretics;” sworn Discouragers, ever on the watch to prevent the tentative half-success from becoming the whole success later on; who pervert plain meanings, and grow personal under the name of practising the great historical method. However, they may have causes to advance, privileges to guard, traditions to keep going; some of which a mere tale-teller, who writes down how the things of the world strike him, without any ulterior intentions whatever, has overlooked, and may by pure inadvertence have run foul of when in the least aggressive mood. Perhaps some passing perception, the outcome of a dream hour would, if generally acted on, cause such an assailant considerable inconvenience with respect to position, interests, family, servant, ox, ass, neighbour, or neighbour’s wife. He therefore valiantly hides his personality behind a publisher’s shutters, and cries “Shame!” So densely is the world thronged that any shifting of positions, even the best warranted advance, galls somebody’s kibe.b Such shiftings often begin in sentiment, and such sentiment sometimes begins in a novel. July 1892 The foregoing remarks were written during the early career of this story, when a spirited public and private criticism of its points was still fresh to the feelings. The pages are allowed to stand for what they are worth, as something once said; but probably they would not have been written now. Even in the short time which has elapsed since the book was first published, some of the critics who provoked the reply have “gone down into silence,”4 as if to remind one of the infinite unimportance of both their say and mine. January 1895 The present edition of this novel contains a few pages that have never appeared in any previous edition. When the detached episodes were collected as stated in the preface of 1891, these pages were overlooked, though they were in the original manuscript. They occur in Chapter X.5 Respecting the sub-title, to which allusion was made above, I may add that it was appended at the last moment, after reading the final proofs, as being the estimate left in a candid mind of the heroine’s character—an estimate that nobody would be likely to dispute. It was disputed more than anything else in the book. Melius fuerat non scribere.c But there it stands. The novel was first published complete, in three volumes, in November 1891. March 1912 T.H. PHASE THE FIRST THE MAIDEN  I ON AN EVENING IN the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular. An empty egg- basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite worn away at its brim where his thumb came in taking it off. Presently he was met by an elderly parson astride on a gray mare, who, as he rode, hummed a wandering tune. “Good night t’ee,” said the man with the basket. “Good night, Sir John,” said the parson. The pedestrian, after another pace or two, halted, and turned round. “Now, sir, begging your pardon; we met last market-day on this road about this time, and I zaid ‘Good night,’ and you made reply ‘Good night, Sir John,’ as now.” “I did,” said the parson. “And once before that—near a month ago.” “I may have.” “Then what might your meaning be in calling me ‘Sir John’ these different times, when I be plain Jack Durbeyfield, the haggler?” d The parson rode a step or two nearer. “It was only my whim,” he said; and, after a moment’s hesitation: “It was on account of a discovery I made some little time ago, whilst I was hunting up pedigrees for the new county history. I am Parson Tringham, the antiquary, of Stagfoot Lane. Don’t you really know, Durbeyfield, that you are the lineal representative of the ancient and knightly family of the d‘Urbervilles, who derive their descent from Sir Pagan d’Urberville, that renowned knight who came from Normandy with William the Conqueror, as appears by Battle Abbey Roll?” 1 “Never heard it before, sir!” “Well it’s true. Throw up your chin a moment, so that I may catch the profile of your face better. Yes, that’s the d’Urberville nose and chin—a little debased. Your ancestor was one of the twelve knights who assisted the Lord of Estremavilla in Normandy in his conquest of Glamorganshire. Branches of your family held manors over all this part of England; their names appear in the Pipe Rolls in the time of King Stephen. In the reign of King John one of them was rich enough to give a manor to the Knights Hospitallers; and in Edward the Second’s time your forefather Brian was summoned to Westminster to attend the great Council there. You declined a little in Oliver Cromwell’s time, but to no serious extent, and in Charles the Second’s reign you were made Knights of the Royal Oak for your loyalty.2 Aye, there have been generations of Sir Johns among you, and if knighthood were hereditary, like a baronetcy; as it practically was in old times, when men were knighted from father to son, you would be Sir John now.” “Ye don’t say so!” “In short,” concluded the parson, decisively smacking his leg with his switch, “there’s hardly such another family in England.” “Daze my eyes, and isn’t there?” said Durbeyfield. “And here have I been knocking about, year after year, from pillar to post, as if I was no more than the commonest feller in the parish... And how long hev this news about me been knowed, Pa’son Tringham?” The clergyman explained that, as far as he was aware, it had quite died out of knowledge, and could hardly be said to be known at all. His own investigations had begun on a day in the preceding spring when, having been engaged in tracing the vicissitudes of the d’Urberville family he had observed Durbeyfield’s name on his waggon, and had thereupon been led to make inquiries about his father and grandfather till he had no doubt on the subject. “At first I resolved not to disturb you with such a useless piece of information,” said he. “However, our impulses are too strong for our judgment sometimes. I thought you might perhaps know something of it all the while.” “Well, I have heard once or twice, ‘tis true, that my family had seen better days afore they came to Blackmoor. But I took no notice o’t, thinking it to mean that we had once kept two horses where we now keep only one. I’ve got a wolde silver spoon, and a wold graven seal at home, too; but, Lord, what’s a spoon and seal?... And to think that I and these noble d‘Urbervilles were one flesh all the time. ’Twas said that my gr‘t-grandfer had secrets, and didn’t care to talk of where he came from... And where do we raise our smoke, now, parson, if I may make so bold; I mean, where do we d’Urbervilles live?”  “You don’t live anywhere. You are extinct—as a county family.” “That’s bad.” “Yes—what the mendacious family chronicles call extinct in the male line —that is, gone down—gone under.” “Then where do we lie?” “At Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill: rows and rows of you in your vaults, with your effigies under Purbeck-marblef canopies.” “And where be our family mansions and estates?” “You haven’t any.” “Oh? No lands neither?” “None; though you once had ’em in abundance, as I said, for your family consisted of numerous branches. In this county there was a seat of yours at Kingsbere, and another at Sherton, and another at Millpond, and another at Lullstead, and another at Wellbridge.” “And shall we ever come into our own again?” “Ah—that I can’t tell!” “And what had I better do about it, sir?” asked Durbeyfield, after a pause. “Oh—nothing, nothing; except chasten yourself with the thought of ‘how are the mighty fallen.’3 It is a fact of some interest to the local historian and genealogist, nothing more. There are several families among the cottagers of this county of almost equal lustre. Good night.” “But you’ll turn back and have a quart of beer wi’ me on the strength o‘t, Pa’son Tringham? There’s a very pretty brew in tap at The Pure Drop— though, to be sure, not so good as at Rolliver’s.” “No, thank you—not this evening, Durbeyfield. You’ve had enough already.” Concluding thus the parson rode on his way, with doubts as to his discretion in retailing this curious bit of lore. When he was gone Durbeyfield walked a few steps in a profound reverie, and then sat down upon the grassy bank by the roadside, depositing his basket before him. In a few minutes a youth appeared in the distance, walking in the same direction as that which had been pursued by Durbeyfield. The latter, on seeing him, held up his hand, and the lad quickened his pace and came near. “Boy, take up that basket! I want ’ee to go on an errand for me.” The lath-like stripling frowned. “Who be you, then, John Durbeyfield, to order me about and call me ‘boy’? You know my name as well as I know yours!” “Do you, do you? That’s the secret—that’s the secret! Now obey my orders, and take the message I’m going to charge ’ee wi’... Well, Fred, I don’t mind telling you that the secret is that I’m one of a noble race—it has been just found out by me this present afternoon, PM.” And as he made the announcement, Durbeyfield, declining from his sitting position, luxuriously stretched himself out upon the bank among the daisies. The lad stood before Durbeyfield, and contemplated his length from crown to toe. “Sir John d‘Urberville—that’s who I am,” continued the prostrate man. “That is if knights were baronets—which they be. ’Tis recorded in history all about me. Dost know of such a place, lad, as Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill?” “Ees. I’ve been there to Greenhill Fair.” “Well, under the church of that city there lie—” “‘Tisn’t a city, the place I mean; leastwise ’twaddn’ when I was there —’twas a little one-eyed, blinking sort o’ place.” “Never you mind the place, boy, that’s not the question before us. Under the church of that there parish lie my ancestors—hundreds of ’em—in coats of mail and jewels, in gr’t lead coffins weighing tons and tons. There’s not a man in the county o’ South-Wessex that’s got grander and nobler skillentons in his family than I.” “Oh?” “Now take up that basket, and goo on to Marlott, and when you’ve come to The Pure Drop Inn, tell ‘em to send a horse and carriage to me immed’ately, to carry me hwome. And in the bottom o’ the carriage they be to put a noggin o’ rum in a small botde, and chalk it up to my account. And when you’ve done that goo on to my house with the basket, and tell my wife to put away that washing, because she needn’t finish it, and wait till I come hwome, as I’ve news to tell her.” As the lad stood in a dubious attitude, Durbeyfield put his hand in his pocket, and produced a shilling, one of the chronically few that he possessed. “Here’s for your labour, lad.” This made a difference in the young man’s estimate of the position. “Yes, Sir John. Thank ‘ee. Anything else I can do for ’ee, Sir John?” “Tell ‘em at hwome that I should like for supper,—well, lamb’s fry if they can get it; and if they can’t, black-pot; and if they can’t get that, well; chitterlingsg will do.” “Yes, Sir John.” The boy took up the basket, and as he set out the notes of a brass band were heard from the direction of the village. “What’s that?” said Durbeyfield. “Not on account o’ I?” “‘Tis the women’s club-walking,h Sir John. Why, your da’ter is one o’ the members.” “To be sure—I’d quite forgot it in my thoughts of greater things! Well, vampi on to Marlott, will ye, and order that carriage, and maybe I’ll drive round and inspect the club.” The lad departed, and Durbeyfield lay waiting on the grass and daisies in the evening sun. Not a soul passed that way for a long while, and the faint notes of the band were the only human sounds audible within the rim of blue hills.  II THE VILLAGE OF MARLOTT lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor aforesaid, an engirdled and secluded region, for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or landscape- painter, though within a four hours’ journey from London. It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the summits of the hills that surround it—except perhaps during the droughts of summer. An unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways. This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. The traveller from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score of miles over calcareous downs and corn-lands, suddenly reaches the verge of one of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to behold, extended like a map beneath him, a country differing absolutely from that which he has passed through. Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed,j the atmosphere colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmoor. The district is of historic, no less than of topographical interest. The Vale was known in former times as the Forest of White Hart, from a curious legend of King Henry III’s reign,k in which the killing by a certain Thomas de la Lynd of a beautiful white hart which the king had run down and spared, was made the occasion of a heavy fine. In those days, and till comparatively recent times, the country was densely wooded. Even now, traces of its earlier condition are to be found in the old oak copses and irregular belts of timber that yet survive upon its slopes, and the hollow-trunked trees that shade so many of its pastures. The forests have departed, but some old customs of their shades remain. Many, however, linger only in a metamorphosed or disguised form. The May- Dayl dance, for instance, was to be discerned on the afternoon under notice, in the guise of the club revel, or “club-walking,” as it was there called. It was an interesting event to the younger inhabitants of Marlott, though its real interest was not observed by the participators in the ceremony. Its singularity lay less in the retention of a custom of walking in procession and dancing on each anniversary than in the members being solely women. In men’s clubs such celebrations were, though expiring, less uncommon; but either the natural shyness of the softer sex, or a sarcastic attitude on the part of male relatives, had denuded such women’s clubs as remained (if any other did) of this their glory and consummation. The club of Marlott alone lived to uphold the local Cereaha.m It had walked for hundreds of years, if not as benefit-club, as votive sisterhood of some sort; and it walked still. The banded ones were all dressed in white gowns—a gay survival from Old Style days, n when cheerfulness and May-time were synonyms—days before the habit of taking long views had reduced emotions to a monotonous average. Their first exhibition of themselves was in a processional march of two and two round the parish. Ideal and real clashed slightly as the sun lit up their figures against the green hedges and creeper-laced house-fronts; for, though the whole troop wore white garments, no two whites were alike among them. Some approached pure blanching; some had a bluish pallor; some worn by the older characters (which had possibly lain by folded for many a year) inclined to a cadaverous tint, and to a Georgiano style. In addition to the distinction of a white frock, every woman and girl carried in her right hand a peeled willow wand, and in her left a bunch of white flowers. The peeling of the former, and the selection of the latter, had been an operation of personal care. There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in the train, their silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces, scourged by time and trouble, having almost a grotesque, certainly a pathetic, appearance in such a jaunty situation. In a true view, perhaps, there was more to be gathered and told of each anxious and experienced one, to whom the years were drawing nigh when she should say, “I have no pleasure in them,”1 than of her juvenile comrades. But let the elder be passed over here for those under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm. The young girls formed, indeed, the majority of the band, and their heads of luxuriant hair reflected in the sunshine every tone of gold, and black, and brown. Some had beautiful eyes, others a beautiful nose, others a beautiful mouth and figure: few, if any, had all. A difficulty of arranging their lips in this crude exposure to public scrutiny, an inability to balance their heads, and to dissociate self-consciousness from their features, was apparent in them, and showed that they were genuine country girls, unaccustomed to many eyes. And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which, though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will. Thus they were all cheerful, and many of them merry. They came round by The Pure Drop Inn, and were turning out of the high road to pass through a wicket-gate into the meadows, when one of the women said— “The Lord-a-Lord! Why, Tess Durbeyfield, if there isn’t thy father riding hwome in a carriage!” A young member of the band turned her head at the exclamation. She was a fine and handsome girl—not handsomer than some others, possibly—but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape. She wore a red ribbon in her hair, and was the only one of the white company who could boast of such a pronounced adornment. As she looked round Durbeyfield was seen moving along the road in a chaise belonging to The Pure Drop, driven by a frizzle-headed brawny damsel with her gown- sleeves rolled above her elbows. This was the cheerful servant of that establishment, who, in her part of factotum, turned groom and ostler at times. Durbeyfield, leaning back, and with his eyes closed luxuriously, was waving his hand above his head, and singing in a slow recitative— “I‘ve-got-a-gr’t-family-vault-at-Kingsbere-and knighted-forefathers-in- lead-coffins-there! ” The clubbists tittered, except the girl called Tess—in whom a slow heat seemed to rise at the sense that her father was making himself foolish in their eyes. “He’s tired, that’s all,” she said hastily, “and he has got a lift home, because our own horse has to rest to-day.” “Bless thy simplicity, Tess,” said her companions. “He’s got his market- nitch.p Haw-haw!” “Look here; I don’t walk another inch with you, if you say any jokes about him!” Tess cried, and the colour upon her cheeks spread over her face and neck. In a moment her eyes grew moist, and her glance drooped to the ground. Perceiving that they had really pained her they said no more, and order again prevailed. Tess’s pride would not allow her to turn her head again, to learn what her father’s meaning was, if he had any; and thus she moved on with the whole body to the enclosure where there was to be dancing on the green. By the time the spot was reached she had recovered her equanimity, and tapped her neighbour with her wand and talked as usual. Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some extent, despite the village school: the characteristic intonation of that dialect for this district being the voicing approximately rendered by the syllable UR, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech. The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word. Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to- day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then. Yet few knew, and still fewer considered this. A small minority, mainly strangers, would look long at her in casually passing by, and grow momentarily fascinated by her freshness, and wonder if they would ever see her again: but to almost everybody she was a fine and picturesque country girl, and no more. Nothing was seen or heard further of Durbeyfield in his triumphal chariot under the conduct of the ostleress, and the club having entered the allotted space, dancing began. As there were no men in the company the girls danced at first with each other, but when the hour for the close of labour drew on, the masculine inhabitants of the village, together with other idlers and pedestrians, gathered round the spot, and appeared inclined to negotiate for a partner. Among these on-lookers were three young men of a superior class, carrying small knapsacks strapped to their shoulders, and stout sticks in their hands. Their general likeness to each other, and their consecutive ages, would almost have suggested that they might be, what in fact they were, brothers. The eldest wore the white tie, high waistcoat, and thin-brimmed hat of the regulation curate; the second was the normal undergraduate; the appearance of the third and youngest would hardly have been sufficient to characterize him; there was an uncribbed, uncabined aspect2 in his eyes and attire, implying that he had hardly as yet found the entrance to his professional groove. That he was a desultory tentative student of something and everything might only have been predicted of him. These three brethren told casual acquaintance that they were spending their Whitsun holidaysq in a walking tour through the Vale of Blackmoor, their course being south-westerly from the town of Shaston on the north-east. They leant over the gate by the highway, and inquired as to the meaning of the dance and the white-frocked maids. The two elder of the brothers were plainly not intending to linger more than a moment, but the spectacle of a bevy of girls dancing without male partners seemed to amuse the third, and make him in no hurry to move on. He unstrapped his knapsack, put it, with his stick, on the hedge-bank, and opened the gate. “What are you going to do, Angel?” asked the eldest. “I am inclined to go and have a fling with them. Why not all of us—just for a minute or two—it will not detain us long?” “No—no; nonsense!” said the first. “Dancing in public with a troop of country hoydens—suppose we should be seen! Come along, or it will be dark before we get to Stourcastle, and there’s no place we can sleep at nearer than that; besides, we must get through another chapter of A Counterblast to Agnosticism3 before we turn in, now I have taken the trouble to bring the book.” “All right—I’ll overtake you and Cuthbert in five minutes; don’t stop; I give my word that I will, Felix.” The two elder reluctantly left him and walked on, taking their brother’s knapsack to relieve him in following, and the youngest entered the field. “This is a thousand pities,” he said gallantly, to two or three of the girls nearest him, as soon as there was a pause in the dance. “Where are your partners, my dears?” “They’ve not left off work yet,” answered one of the boldest. “They’ll be here by and by. Till then, will you be one, sir?” “Certainly. But what’s one among so many!” “Better than none. ’Tis melancholy work facing and footing it to one of your own sort, and no clipsing and collingr at all. Now, pick and choose.” “‘Ssh—don’t be so for’ard!” said a shyer girl. The young man, thus invited, glanced them over, and attempted some discrimination; but, as the group were all so new to him, he could not very well exercise it. He took almost the first that came to hand, which was not the speaker, as she had expected; nor did it happen to be Tess Durbeyfield. Pedigree, ancestral skeletons, monumental record, the d’Urberville lineaments, did not help Tess in her life’s battle as yet, even to the extent of attracting to her a dancing-partner over the heads of the commonest peasantry. So much for Norman blood unaided by Victorian lucre. The name of the eclipsing girl, whatever it was, has not been handed down; but she was envied by all as the first who enjoyed the luxury of a masculine partner that evening. Yet such was the force of example that the village young men, who had not hastened to enter the gate while no intruder was in the way, now dropped in quickly, and soon the couples became leavened with rustic youth to a marked extent, till at length the plainest woman in the club was no longer compelled to foot it on the masculine side of the figure. The church clock struck, when suddenly the student said that he must leave —he had been forgetting himself—he had to join his companions. As he fell out of the dance his eyes lighted on Tess Durbeyfield, whose own large orbs wore, to tell the truth, the faintest aspect of reproach that he had not chosen her. He, too, was sorry then that, owing to her backwardness, he had not observed her; and with that in his mind he left the pasture. On account of his long delay he started in a flying-run down the lane westward, and had soon passed the hollow and mounted the next rise. He had not yet overtaken his brothers, but he paused to get breath, and looked back. He could see the white figures of the girls in the green enclosure whirling about as they had whirled when he was among them. They seemed to have quite forgotten him already. All of them, except, perhaps, one. This white shape stood apart by the hedge alone. From her position he knew it to be the pretty maiden with whom he had not danced. Trifling as the matter was, he yet instinctively felt that she was hurt by his oversight. He wished that he had asked her; he wished that he had inquired her name. She was so modest, so expressive, she had looked so soft in her thin white gown that he felt he had acted stupidly. However, it could not be helped, and turning, and bending himself to a rapid walk, he dismissed the subject from his mind.  III As FOR TESS DURBEYFIELD, she did not easily dislodge the incident from her consideration. She had no spirit to dance again for a long time, though she might have had plenty of partners; but, ah! they did not speak so nicely as the strange young man had done. It was not till the rays of the sun had absorbed the young stranger’s retreating figure on the hill that she shook off her temporary sadness and answered her would-be partner in the affirmative. She remained with her comrades till dusk, and participated with a certain zest in the dancing; though, being heart-whole as yet, she enjoyed treading a measure purely for its own sake; little divining when she saw “the soft torments, the bitter sweets, the pleasing pains, and the agreeable distresses”1 of those girls who had been wooed and won, what she herself was capable of in that kind. The struggles and wrangles of the lads for her hand in a jig were an amusement to her—no more; and when they became fierce she rebuked them. She might have stayed even later, but the incident of her father’s odd appearance and manner returned upon the girl’s mind to make her anxious, and wondering what had become of him she dropped away from the dancers and bent her steps towards the end of the village at which the parental cottage lay. While yet many score yards off, other rhythmic sounds than those she had quitted became audible to her; sounds that she knew well—so well. They were a regular series of thumpings from the interior of the house, occasioned by the violent rocking of a cradle upon a stone floor, to which movement a feminine voice kept time by singing, in a vigorous gallopade,s the favourite ditty of “The Spotted Cow”—2 I saw her lie do‘-own in yon’-der green gro‘-ove; Come, love!’ and I’ll tell’ you where!’ The cradle-rocking and the song would cease simultaneously for a moment, and an exclamation at highest vocal pitch would take the place of the melody. “God bless thy dimentt eyes! And thy waxen cheeks! And thy cherry mouth! And thy Cubit’su thighs! And every bit o’ thy blessed body!” After this invocation the rocking and the singing would recommence, and the “Spotted Cow” proceed as before. So matters stood when Tess opened the door, and paused upon the mat within it surveying the scene. The interior, in spite of the melody, struck upon the girl’s senses with an unspeakable dreariness. From the holiday gaieties of the field—the white gowns, the nosegays, the willow-wands, the whirling movements on the green, the flash of gentle sentiment towards the stranger—to the yellow melancholy of this one-candled s