Return Of The Native E-Book

Thomas Hardy.

• Herausgeber: Thomas Hardy
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.The Return Of The Native(1878) is Thomas Hardy's sixth published novel. One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works. The heath's changing face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, inn-keepers, sons, mothers, and lovers who populate the novel. The "native" is Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris. He; his cousin Thomasin; her fiancé, Damon Wildeve; and the willful Eustacia Vye are the protagonists in a tale of doomed love, passion, alienation, and melancholy as Hardy brilliantly explores that theme so familiar throughout his fiction: the diabolical role of chance in determining the course of a life.

Leseprobe

Return of the Native

by

Thomas Hardy

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Preface

Book One — The Three Women

A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression

Humanity Appears upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with Trouble

The Custom of the Country

The Halt on the Turnpike Road

Perplexity among Honest People

The Figure against the Sky

Queen of Night

Those Who Are Found Where There Is Said to Be Nobody

Love Leads a Shrewd Man into Strategy

A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion

The Dishonesty of an Honest Woman

Book Two — The Arrival

Tidings of the Comer

The People at Blooms-End Make Ready

How a Little Sound Produced a Great Dream

Eustacia Is Led on to an Adventure

Through the Moonlight

The Two Stand Face to Face

A Coalition between Beauty and Oddness

Firmness Is Discovered in a Gentle Heart

Book Three — The Fascination

“My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is”

The New Course Causes Disappointment

The First Act in a Timeworn Drama

An Hour of Bliss and Many Hours of Sadness

Sharp Words Are Spoken, and a Crisis Ensues

Yeobright Goes, and the Breach Is Complete

The Morning and the Evening of a Day

A New Force Disturbs the Current

Book Four — The Closed Door

The Rencounter by the Pool

He Is Set upon by Adversities but He Sings a Song

She Goes Out to Battle against Depression

Rough Coercion Is Employed

The Journey across the Heath

A Conjuncture, and Its Result upon the Pedestrian

The Tragic Meeting of Two Old Friends

Eustacia Hears of Good Fortune, and Beholds Evil

Book Five — The Discovery

“Wherefore Is Light Given to Him That Is in Misery”

A Lurid Light Breaks in upon a Darkened Understanding

Eustacia Dresses Herself on a Black Morning

The Ministrations of a Half-forgotten One

An Old Move Inadvertently Repeated

Thomasin Argues with Her Cousin, and He Writes a Letter

The Night of the Sixth of November

Rain, Darkness, and Anxious Wanderers

Sights and Sounds Draw the Wanderers Together

Book Six — Aftercourses

The Inevitable Movement Onward

Thomasin Walks in a Green Place by the Roman Road

The Serious Discourse of Clym with His Cousin

Cheerfulness Again Asserts Itself at Blooms-End, and Clym Finds His Vocation

Preface

The date at which the following events are assumed to have occurred may be set down as between 1840 and 1850, when the old watering place herein called “Budmouth” still retained sufficient afterglow from its Georgian gaiety and prestige to lend it an absorbing attractiveness to the romantic and imaginative soul of a lonely dweller inland.

Under the general name of “Egdon Heath,” which has been given to the sombre scene of the story, are united or typified heaths of various real names, to the number of at least a dozen; these being virtually one in character and aspect, though their original unity, or partial unity, is now somewhat disguised by intrusive strips and slices brought under the plough with varying degrees of success, or planted to woodland.

It is pleasant to dream that some spot in the extensive tract whose southwestern quarter is here described, may be the heath of that traditionary King of Wessex — Lear.

July, 1895.

“To sorrow

I bade good morrow,

And thought to leave her far away behind;

But cheerly, cheerly,

She loves me dearly;

She is so constant to me, and so kind.

I would deceive her,

And so leave her,

But ah! she is so constant and so kind.”

Book One — 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.

The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.

In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be perceived in its shades and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternization towards which each advanced halfway.

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis — the final overthrow.

It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of flowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious only with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than the present. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications which frequently invest the facade of a prison with far more dignity than is found in the facade of a palace double its size lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas, if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from, the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.