Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman

If an offense come out of the truth, better it is that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.

a novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest;

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.

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.

They are those who seek only their own ideas in a representation, and prize that which should be as higher than what is.

Such shiftings often begin in sentiment, and such sentiment sometimes begins in a novel.

days before the habit of taking long views had reduced emotions to a monotonous average.

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.

Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience.

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.

The interior, in spite of the melody, struck upon the girl’s senses with an unspeakable dreariness.

Besides the jar of contrast there came to her a chill self-reproach that she had not returned sooner, to help her mother in these domesticities, instead of indulging herself out-of-doors.

there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily understood. When they were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were juxtaposed.

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

In this process the chamber and its furniture grew more and more dignified and luxurious; the shawl hanging at the window took upon itself the richness of tapestry; the brass handles of the chest of drawers were as golden knockers; and the carved bedposts seemed to have some kinship with the magnificent pillars of Solomon’s temple.

’Tis very unlucky that we didn’t pitch on a sound one, when there were so many more of ’em!

The renewed subject, which seemed to have impregnated the whole family, filled Tess with impatience.

In the Durbeyfield countenances there was nothing of the red wrath that would have burnt upon the girl from parents more ambitious for her welfare.

When it was discovered that the knacker and tanner would give only a very few shillings for Prince’s carcase because of his decrepitude, Durbeyfield rose to the occasion.

Distress, if not penury, loomed in the distance.

The oppressive sense of the harm she had done led Tess to be more deferential than she might otherwise have been to the maternal wish;

Her mother’s intelligence was that of a happy child: Joan Durbeyfield was simply an additional one, and that not the eldest, to her own long family of waiters on Providence.

Everything on this snug property was bright, thriving, and well kept; acres of glass-houses stretched down the inclines to the copses at their feet. Everything looked like money—like the last coin issued from the Mint.

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 for loving.

Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.

The light-minded woman had been discovering good matches for her daughter almost from the year of her birth.

It is not me alone. Tib has to be considered, and she has a very queer temper.

You artful hussy! Now, tell me—didn’t you make that hat blow off on purpose? I’ll swear you did!

She had, in fact, undone the kiss, as far as such a thing was physically possible.

How could she face her parents, get back her box, and disconcert the whole scheme for the rehabilitation of her family on such sentimental grounds?

The lower rooms were entirely given over to the birds, who walked about them with a proprietary air, as though the place had been built by themselves, and not by certain dusty copyholders who now lay east and west in the churchyard.

The descendants of these bygone owners felt it almost as a slight to their family when the house which had so much of their affection, had cost so much of their forefathers’ money, and had been in their possession for several generations before the d’Urbervilles came and built here, was indifferently turned into a fowl-house by Mrs Stoke-d’Urberville as soon as the property fell into hand according to law.

She had the mobile face frequent in those whose sight has decayed by stages, has been laboriously striven after, and reluctantly let go, rather than the stagnant mien apparent in persons long sightless or born blind.

It reminded Tess of a Confirmation, in which Mrs d’Urberville was the bishop, the fowls the young people presented, and herself and the maid-servant the parson and curate of the parish bringing them up.

Mrs d’Urberville was not the first mother compelled to love her offspring resentfully, and to be bitterly fond.

The levity of some of the younger women in and about Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the choice spirit who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity.

The staple conversation on the farms around was on the uselessness of saving money; and smock-frocked arithmeticians, leaning on their ploughs or hoes, would enter into calculations of great nicety to prove that parish relief was a fuller provision for a man in his old age than any which could result from savings out of their wages during a whole lifetime.

Being graceful and interesting, standing moreover on the momentary threshold of womanhood, her appearance drew down upon her some sly regards from loungers in the streets of Chaseborough; hence, though sometimes her journey to the town was made independently, she always searched for her fellows at nightfall, to have the protection of their companionship homeward.

Through this floating, fusty débris of peat and hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the dancers, and forming together a sort of vegeto-human pollen, the muted fiddles feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast to the spirit with which the measure was trodden out.

They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they.

Tess, however, had undergone such painful experiences of this kind in her father’s house that the discovery of their condition spoilt the pleasure she was beginning to feel in the moonlight journey.

the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing, and her views of life had been totally changed for her by the lesson.

An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from her mother’s door to try her fortune at Trantridge poultry-farm.

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.

It was to be.

I didn’t understand your meaning till it was too late.

I have said I will not take anything more from you, and I will not—I cannot! I should be your creature to go on doing that, and I won’t!

She bowed to him slightly, her eye just lingering in his; and then she turned to take the parcels for departure.

You don’t give me your mouth and kiss me back. You never willingly do that—you’ll never love me, I fear.

If I did love you, I may have the best o’ causes for letting you know it. But I don’t.

You can hold your own for beauty against any woman of these parts, gentle or simple; I say it to you as a practical man and well-wisher.

Never, never! I made up my mind as soon as I saw—what I ought to have seen sooner; and I won’t come.

Though I do more real work to-day than all the week besides.

THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH, NOT.

That’s what they are meant to be!

But you should read my hottest ones—them I kips for slums and seaports. They’d make ye wriggle!

Pooh—I don’t believe God said such things!

Her mother, who had just come downstairs, turned to greet her from the fireplace, where she was kindling barked-oak twigs under the breakfast kettle.

He’s not my cousin, and he’s not going to marry me.

Perhaps any woman would except me.

I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn’t you warn me?

the illusion was transient as lightning; 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.

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.

But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord.

The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression.

A field-man is a personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself with it.

She felt that she would do well to be useful again—to taste anew sweet independence at any price.

The past was past; whatever it had been, it was no more at hand.

She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself.

Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.

There are counterpoises and compensations in life; and the event which had made of her a social warning had also for the moment made her the most interesting personage in the village to many.

her soul’s desire was to continue that offence by preserving the life of the child.

The calmness which had possessed Tess since the christening remained with her in the infant’s loss.

if Providence would not ratify such an act of approximation she, for one, did not value the kind of heaven lost by the irregularity—either for herself or for her child.

But for the world’s opinion those experiences would have been simply a liberal education.

To escape the past and all that appertained thereto was to annihilate it, and to do that she would have to get away.

Was once lost always lost really true of chastity? she would ask herself. She might prove it false if she could veil bygones.

To persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical degrees, parishes as counties, counties as provinces and kingdoms.

She would be the dairymaid Tess, and nothing more.

The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet pleasure somewhere, which pervades all life, from the meanest to the highest, had at length mastered Tess.

The world was drawn to a larger pattern here. The enclosures numbered fifty acres instead of ten, the farmsteads were more extended, the groups of cattle formed tribes hereabout; there only families.

The green lea was speckled as thickly with them as a canvas by Van Alsloot or Sallaert with burghers.

The river itself, which nourished the grass and cows of these renowned dairies, flowed not like the streams in Blackmoor. Those were slow, silent, often turbid; flowing over beds of mud into which the incautious wader might sink and vanish unawares. The Froom waters were clear as the pure River of Life shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day long.

Either the change in the quality of the air from heavy to light, or the sense of being amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes upon her, sent up her spirits wonderfully.

Her hopes mingled with the sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her as she bounded along against the soft south wind.

The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet pleasure somewhere, which pervades all life, from the meanest to the highest, had at length mastered Tess.

Such high contentment with such a slight initial performance as that of having started towards a means of independent living was a part of the Durbeyfield temperament.

women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye.

The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and maids, the men operating on the hard-teated animals, the maids on the kindlier natures.

It was not the loss for the moment that made slack milking so serious, but that with the decline of demand there came decline, and ultimately cessation, of supply.

Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement to the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield; and the band of milkers at this request burst into melody—in purely business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement during the song’s continuance.

The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased to exist. He had been disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-creatures—beings of many minds, beings infinite in difference

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity.

Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly—the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things.

before the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens gray

The maids’ private aims, however, were the reverse of the dairyman’s rule

Knowing, however, the dairyman’s wish, she endeavoured conscientiously to take the animals just as they came, excepting the very hard yielders which she could not yet manage.

The perception arrested him less when he reflected that what are called advanced ideas are really in great part but the latest fashion in definition—a more accurate expression, by words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries.

Not guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration.

Tess’s passing corporeal blight had been her mental harvest.

The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands’ and thousands’, and that your coming life and doings ’ll be like thousands’ and thousands’.

They met daily in that strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the violet or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very early, here.

In the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman—a whole sex condensed into one typical form.

Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity who could confer bliss to those of a being who craved it.

The evening sun was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in the sky.

She was wretched—O so wretched—at the perception that to her companions the dairyman’s story had been rather a humorous narration than otherwise; none of them but herself seemed to see the sorrow of it; to a certainty, not one knew how cruelly it touched the tender place in her experience.

Being more finely formed, better educated, and, though the youngest except Retty, more woman than either, she perceived that only the slightest ordinary care was necessary for holding her own in Angel Clare’s heart against these her candid friends.

Such unequal attachments had led to marriage; and she had heard from Mrs Crick that Mr Clare had one day asked, in a laughing way, what would be the use of his marrying a fine lady, and all the while ten thousand acres of Colonial pasture to feed, and cattle to rear, and corn to reap. A farm-woman would be the only sensible kind of wife for him.

They crept and crept, the hem of her petticoat just touching his gaiter, and his elbow sometimes brushing hers.

He knew that the water had risen at that spot, and that it would quite check their progress. So he had hastened on, with a dim idea of how he could help them—one of them in particular.

the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences.

The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.

Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her.

The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which she was born.

The full recognition of the futility of their infatuation, from a social point of view; its purposeless beginning; its self-bounded outlook; its lack of everything to justify its existence in the eye of civilization (while lacking nothing in the eye of Nature); the one fact that it did exist, ecstasizing them to a killing joy—all this imparted to them a resignation, a dignity, which a practical and sordid expectation of winning him as a husband would have destroyed.

Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with a conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life—a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself.

To encounter her daily in the accustomed manner would be to develop what had begun. Living in such close relations, to meet meant to fall into endearment; flesh and blood could not resist it; and, having arrived at no conclusion as to the issue of such a tendency, he decided to hold aloof for the present from occupations in which they would be mutually engaged.

He loved her; ought he to marry her? Dared he to marry her? What would his mother and his brothers say? What would he himself say a couple of years after the event? That would depend upon whether the germs of staunch comradeship underlay the temporary emotion, or whether it were a sensuous joy in her form only, with no substratum of everlastingness.

The New Testament was less a Christiad then a Pauliad to his intelligence—less an argument than an intoxication.

He despised the Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles, and deemed himself consistent through the whole category—which in a way he might have been. One thing he certainly was—sincere.

To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and lush womanhood which his son Angel had lately been experiencing in Var Vale, his temper would have been antipathetic in a high degree, had he either by inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it.

Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only the great passionate pulse of existence, unwarped, uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds which futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content to regulate.

On their part they saw a great difference in him, a growing divergence from the Angel Clare of former times. It was chiefly a difference in his manner that they noticed just now, particularly his brothers. He was getting to behave like a farmer; he flung his legs about; the muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke, and more.

If these two noticed Angel’s growing social ineptness, he noticed their growing mental limitations.

Neither saw the difference between local truth and universal truth; that what the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite a different thing from what the outer world was thinking.

Was it not proved nineteen hundred years ago—if I may trespass upon your domain a little? Why should you think, Felix, that I am likely to drop my high thinking and my moral ideals?

A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to you in your goings-out and your comings-in. Beyond that, it really matters little.

But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows, churn good butter, make immense cheeses; know how to sit hens and turkeys and rear chickens, to direct a field of labourers in an emergency, and estimate the value of sheep and calves?

As to external accomplishments, what will be the use of them in the life I am going to lead?—while as to her reading, I can take that in hand. She’ll be apt pupil enough, as you would say if you knew her. She’s brim full of poetry—actualized poetry, if I may use the expression. She lives what paper-poets only write...

It was probable that, in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral and intellectual training would appreciably, perhaps considerably, elevate the involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human nature; but up to the present day, culture, as far as he could see, might be said to have affected only the mental epiderm of those lives which had been brought under its influence.

This belief was confirmed by his experience of women, which, having latterly been extended from the cultivated middle-class into the rural community, had taught him how much less was the intrinsic difference between the good and wise woman of one social stratum and the good and wise woman of another social stratum, than between the good and bad, the wise and the foolish, of the same stratum or class.

He would have been an awkward member of the party; for, though the most appreciative humanist, the most ideal religionist, even the best-versed Christologist of the three, there was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him.

Politically I am sceptical as to the virtue of their being old. Some of the wise even among themselves ‘exclaim against their own succession,’ as Hamlet puts it; but lyrically, dramatically, and even historically, I am tenderly attached to them.

The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her.

It was a moment when a woman’s soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.

She had come to Talbothays with a made-up mind. On no account could she agree to a step which might afterwards cause bitter rueing to her husband for his blindness in wedding her.

Reckless, inconsiderate acceptance of him; to close with him at the altar, revealing nothing, and chancing discovery; to snatch ripe pleasure before the iron teeth of pain could have time to shut upon her: that was what love counselled;

It all turned on that release.

What had given her strength to refuse him this time was solely the tale of the widow told by the dairyman; and that would have been overcome in another moment.

There are very few women’s lives that are not—tremulous,

I—I—am not a Durbeyfield, but a d’Urberville—a descendant of the same family as those that owned the old house we passed. And—we are all gone to nothing!

Well—why should I love you less after knowing this?

I do hate the aristocratic principle of blood before everything, and do think that as reasoners the only pedigrees we ought to respect are those spiritual ones of the wise and virtuous, without regard to corporal paternity.

Society is hopelessly snobbish, and this fact of your extraction may make an appreciable difference to its acceptance of you as my wife,

The secret is out, so why should you any longer refuse me?

She dismissed the past—trod upon it and put it out, as one treads on a coal that is smouldering and dangerous.

A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual remembrance. She walked in brightness, but she knew that in the background those shapes of darkness were always spread.

Distinction does not consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but in being numbered among those who are true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of good report—as you are, my Tess.

He sat on by the cheerful firelight thrown from a bundle of green ash-sticks laid across the dogs; the sticks snapped pleasantly, and hissed out bubbles of sap from their ends.

’tis always mournful not to be wanted, even if at the same time ’tis convenient.

She hated the thought, and she hated more the thought of going home.

He loved her dearly, though perhaps rather ideally and fancifully than with the impassioned thoroughness of her feeling for him.

The secret lay in the tinge of recklessness imparted to his career and character by the sense that he had been made to miss his true destiny through the prejudices of his family.

She who had been so backward was suddenly fired with impatience and alarm lest she should lose her dear prize.

The mountain had not yet been removed.

I do not, Tessy, really.

She was a sort of celestial person, who owed her being to poetry—one of those classical divinities Clare was accustomed to talk to her about when they took their walks together.

This condition of mind, wherein she felt glorified by an irradiation not her own, like the angel whom St John saw in the sun, lasted till the sound of the church bells had died away, and the emotions of the wedding-service had calmed down.

He knew that she did, and the words had no serious intent; but she was surcharged with emotion, and winced like a wounded animal.

As everybody knows, fine feathers make fine birds; a peasant girl but very moderately prepossessing to the casual observer in her simple condition and attire will bloom as an amazing beauty if clothed as a woman of fashion with the aids that Art can render;

She had deserved worse—yet she was the chosen one. It was wicked of her to take all without paying. She would pay to the uttermost farthing; she would tell, there and then.

the essence of things had changed.

The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great after enlightenment,

The little less, and what worlds away!

Nothing so pure, so sweet, so virginal as Tess had seemed possible all the long while that he had adored her, up to an hour ago; but The little less, and what worlds away!

He was simply regarding the harrowing contingencies of human experience, the unexpectedness of things.

The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires.

Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess’s countenance that he gazed at her with a stupefied air.

his affection itself was less fire than radiance, and, with regard to the other sex, when he ceased to believe he ceased to follow:

Sheer experience had already taught her that in some circumstances there was one thing better than to lead a good life, and that was to be saved from leading any life whatever.

With these natures, corporal presence is something less appealing than corporal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real.

Moreover, when two people are once parted—have abandoned a common domicile and a common environment—new growths insensibly bud upward to fill each vacated place;

Self-solicitude was near extinction in her, and in the knowledge that he had planned to depart on the morrow, possibly for always, she lay in his arms in this precarious position with a sense rather of luxury than of terror.

It was consoling, under the hovering terror of to-morrow’s separation, to feel that he really recognized her now as his wife Tess, and did not cast her off, even if in that recognition he went so far as to arrogate to himself the right of harming her.

The swift stream raced and gyrated under them, tossing, distorting, and splitting the moon’s reflected face.

He thus beheld in the pale morning light the resolve to separate from her; not as a hot and indignant instinct, but denuded of the passionateness which had made it scorch and burn; standing in its bones; nothing but a skeleton, but none the less there.

Pride, too, entered into her submission—which perhaps was a symptom of that reckless acquiescence in chance too apparent in the whole d’Urberville family—and the many effective chords which she could have stirred by an appeal were left untouched.

God’s not in his heaven: All’s wrong with the world!

As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess’s father was heard approaching at that moment. He did not, however, enter immediately, and Mrs Durbeyfield said that she would break the bad news to him herself, Tess keeping out of sight for the present.

The picture of life had changed for him. Before this time he had known it but speculatively; now he thought he knew it as a practical man

Nevertheless humanity stood before him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum

This was what he had got by apostasy, and his punishment was deserved

In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire

No prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this young wife of his was as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same dislike of evil

the figure near at hand suffers on such occasion, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honoured, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains

Why not be revenged on society by shaping his future domesticities loosely, instead of kissing the pedagogic rod of convention in this ensnaring manner

Women may be bad, but they are not so bad as men in these things!

The wife of Angel Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt its curve, and the edges of her eye-sockets perceptible under the soft skin, and thought as she did so that a time would come when that bone would be bare.

She had occasionally caught glimpses of these men in girlhood, looking over hedges, or peeping through bushes, and pointing their guns, strangely accoutred, a bloodthirsty light in their eyes.

With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as much as for herself, Tess’s first thought was to put the still living birds out of their torture,

But that she could not do so long as it was held by Clare.

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs Angel Clare; and it sustained her.

The wall seemed to be the only friend she had. She had so little wish to leave it that she could have stayed there all night.

There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is called being wet through in common talk. But to stand working slowly in a field, and feel the creep of rain-water, first in legs and shoulders, then on hips and head, then at back, front, and sides, and yet to work on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that the sun is down, demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.

So these two upper and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over the surface of the former like flies.

The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone.

they lived all this afternoon in memories of green, sunny, romantic Talbothays.

Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes, impulsively faced in the direction in which she imagined South America to lie, and, putting up her lips, blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind.

Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

She lay in a state of percipience without volition, and the rustle of the straw and the cutting of the ears by the others had the weight of bodily touches.

She had set herself to stand or fall by her qualities, and to waive such merely technical claims upon a strange family as had been established for her by the flimsy fact of a member of that family, in a season of impulse, writing his name in a church-book beside hers.

In jumping at Publicans and Sinners they would forget that a word might be said for the worries of Scribes and Pharisees; and this defect or limitation might have recommended their own daughter-in-law to them at this moment as a fairly choice sort of lost person for their love.

Her present condition was precisely one which would have enlisted the sympathies of old Mr and Mrs Clare. Their hearts went out of them at a bound towards extreme cases, when the subtle mental troubles of the less desperate among mankind failed to win their interest or regard.

The greater the sinner, the greater the saint; it was not necessary to dive far into Christian history to discover that.

It was but the usage of thought which had been jarred in her at hearing good new words in bad old notes.

The former curves of sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion.

the break of continuity between her earlier and present existence, which she had hoped for, had not, after all, taken place.

Bygones would never be complete bygones till she was a bygone herself.

He who had wrought her undoing was now on the side of the Spirit, while she remained unregenerate.

I have come with that sole purpose in view—nothing more.

Such flashes as you feel, Alec, I fear don’t last!

It was put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor who was tortured there by nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung. The bones lie underneath.

You were well dressed, and I did not think of it. But I see now that it is hard—harder than it used to be when I—knew you—harder than you deserve.

The whole blame was mine—the whole unconventional business of our time at Trantridge.

I say in all earnestness that it is a shame for parents to bring up their girls in such dangerous ignorance of the gins and nets that the wicked may set for them, whether their motive be a good one or the result of simple indifference.

duty and desire ran hand-in-hand.

I love somebody else.

He is so unpleasant to me.

I have been cured of the presumption of thinking otherwise.

Your mind is enslaved to his.

What’s good enough for him is good enough for me.

I was on the way to, at least, social salvation till I saw you again!

The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served to chill its effervescence to stagnation.

Once victim, always victim—that’s the law!

I am more taken with you than ever, and I pity you too.

If you are any man’s wife you are mine!

The punishment you have measured out to me is deserved—I do know that—well deserved—and you are right and just to be angry with me.

I live entirely for you. I love you too much to blame you for going away,

I am the same woman, Angel, as you fell in love with; yes, the very same!—not the one you disliked but never saw.

I became another woman, filled full of new life from you.

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

Despite her not inviolate past, what still abode in such a woman as Tess outvalued the freshness of her fellows.

The mistake of expressing them had arisen from his allowing himself to be influenced by general principles to the disregard of the particular instance.

Men are too often harsh with women they love or have loved; women with men.

So does Time ruthlessly destroy his own romances.

Violent motion relieved thought.

Nightfall, which in the frost of winter comes as a fiend and in the warmth of summer as a lover, came as a tranquillizer on this March day.

So do flux and reflux—the rhythm of change—alternate and persist in everything under the sky.

Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?

To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify,

It was not her husband, she had said. Yet a consciousness that in a physical sense this man alone was her husband seemed to weigh on her more and more.

They were only women; they were not regular labourers; they were not particularly required anywhere; hence they had to hire a waggon at their own expense, and got nothing sent gratuitously.

A wet Lady-Day was a spectre which removing families never forgot; damp furniture, damp bedding, damp clothing accompanied it, and left a train of ills.

The groundwork of the arrangement was the family dresser, which, with its shining handles, and finger-marks, and domestic evidences thick upon it, stood importantly in front, over the tails of the shaft-horses, in its erect and natural position, like some Ark of the Covenant that they were bound to carry reverently.

The contrast well marked the difference between being fetched by a thriving farmer and conveying oneself whither no hirer waited one’s coming.

Of all the reminders that she had ever received that her people were socially extinct, there was none so forcible as this spoliation.

The old order changeth. The little finger of the sham d’Urberville can do more for you than the whole dynasty of the real underneath....

What woman, indeed, among the most faithful adherents of the truth, believes the promises and threats of the Word in the sense in which she believes in her own children, or would not throw her theology to the wind if weighed against their happiness?

She was passionate, and her present letter, showing that her estimate of him had changed under his delay—too justly changed, he sadly owned,—made him ask himself if it would be wise to confront her unannounced in the presence of her parents.

He had undergone some strange experiences in his absence; he had seen the virtual Faustina in the literal Cornelia, a spiritual Lucretia in a corporeal Phryne; he had thought of the woman taken and set in the midst as one deserving to be stoned, and of the wife of Uriah being made a queen; and he had asked himself why he had not judged Tess constructively rather than biographically, by the will rather than by the deed?

I must cry to you in my trouble—I have no one else!

please, please, not to be just—only a little kind to me.

I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your servant, if I may not as your wife; so that I could only be near you, and get glimpses of you, and think of you as mine....

I long for only one thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet you, my own dear!

The house in which Tess had passed the years of her childhood was now inhabited by another family who had never known her.

Even the spring birds sang over their heads as if they thought there was nobody missing in particular.

How are the Mighty Fallen.

Where could Tess possibly be, a cottage-girl, his young wife, amidst all this wealth and fashion?

She seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream, who tries to move away, but cannot.

he had a vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear to him till later; that his original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize the body before him as hers—allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will.

And then my dear, dear husband came home to me ... and I did not know it!... And you had used your cruel persuasion upon me ... you did not stop using it—no—you did not stop!

And at last I believed you and gave way!... And then he came back! Now he is gone. Gone a second time, and I have lost him now for ever ... and he will not love me the littlest bit ever any more—only hate me!

And my sin will kill him and not kill me!... O, you have torn my life all to pieces ... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!

I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what to-morrow has in store?

All is trouble outside there; inside here content.

I would rather be dead and buried when the time comes for you to despise me, so that it may never be known to me that you despised me.

Tenderness was absolutely dominant in Clare at last.

He was still her Antinous, her Apollo even; his sickly face was beautiful as the morning to her affectionate regard on this day no less than when she first beheld him;

It is Stonehenge!

Older than the centuries; older than the d’Urbervilles!

It seems as if there were no folk in the world but we two; and I wish there were not—except ’Liza-Lu.

This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!

this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

Project Gutenberg is synonymous with the free distribution of electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg collection will remain freely available for generations to come.