In order that I would not be given a false sense of their reality, the characters who pretended to breathe and move about and talk in #20 were called Clym Yeobright or Grandfer Cantle, Wildeve, Thomasin, Fairway and Susan Nunsuch, Diggory Venn and Eustacia Vye, and I must admit these silly artificial names were repellent even to my eager and injudicious ear; nor was the cover any inducement, for it showed a vacuously handsome young man dressed in a conservative blue suit, white shirt, and floppy bow tie, who is gazing over his shoulder toward some pink hills on which there improbably appears a marble edifice resembling the Lincoln Memorial, while an equally empty and conventionally drawn young woman with windblown hair is pulling on and otherwise beseeching his other shoulder, as if to say: do not dream of such things . . . come away . . . come away; nevertheless, the first words I read when I opened the book were on page 357 (as Fate & Hardy had arranged it): A Lurid Light Breaks In Upon a Darkened Understanding; and how could I (or anyone) resist that? Besides, just below the mausoleum, William Lyon Phelps, in white type, is quoted saying “I have always regarded The Return of the Native as his masterpiece,” and who could remain unmoved by William Lyon Phelps—in white type? Furthermore, the initial page, always crucial, passed every test, with its promises and divisions, its portentous opening paragraph like the great door of a church, its exotic setting and strange names, the rolling orchestration of its prose.

BOOK FIRST

THE THREE WOMEN

Chapter 1

A Face on Which Time Makes But Little Impression

A SATURDAY afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, I should say, this sort of thing is irresistible, and a word like embrowned is every bit as stirring as ‘fulminancy,’ Carlyle’s piece of cheese. Anyway, I went for it, and until I encountered the text again (in London, during the blitz), I had been encouraged by the critics to believe that this work might be, indeed, a masterpiece; but then, when a whole wall of books blew about like leaves, and Hardy’s novel gave me a hearty clap on the back like an old friend, the mendacity of the literary mind was shown to me in something resembling a revelation as I flipped through the book’s pages and grinned . . . and laughed sourly . . . and grinned again. I had been duped. I was a dunce. And those others—they were educated, older, they knew—they were liars. It may have been at that time that my ascent of Mount Parnassus slowed, and I began to turn toward history.

Now, though, as I hold #20 in my hand for I have it still, and The Four Million [#65] as well as others, most with the pages white, their Perma-Gloss intact, and covers firm), I am brought by chance to passages of somber, quite bombastless beauty, and I find that my present feelings, like the rest of my life, are in a state of insecurity and confusion. I shall copy it down, because that’s all I can do, But ‘bombastless’—there’s a word Carlyle could not complain of.