finished_summaries/novelguide/Tess of the d'Urbervilles/section_4_part_1.txt
Tess of the d'Urbervilles.chapter xxv
chapter xxv
{"name": "Chapter XXV", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase4-chapter25-34", "summary": "Angel visits his family at the parsonage in Emminster to think and to tell his parents about his plans to marry Tess. He finds them at breakfast with his brothers Felix, a village curate, and Cuthbert, a Cambridge dean. They notice that Angel has taken on the crude mannerisms of the farm, and he realizes that they have become frozen intellectually. Angel's mother gives away the meat puddings Mrs. Crick prepared as a gift and puts the mead in the medicine cabinet because it is too strong to drink", "analysis": ""}


Clare, restless, went out into the dusk when evening drew on, she who
had won him having retired to her chamber.

The night was as sultry as the day.  There was no coolness after dark
unless on the grass.  Roads, garden-paths, the house-fronts, the
barton-walls were warm as hearths, and reflected the noontime
temperature into the noctambulist's face.

He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew not what to think
of himself.  Feeling had indeed smothered judgement that day.

Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain had kept
apart.  She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what had occurred,
while the novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance
disquieted him--palpitating, contemplative being that he was.  He
could hardly realize their true relations to each other as yet, and
what their mutual bearing should be before third parties
thenceforward.

Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that his temporary
existence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed
through and early forgotten; he had come as to a place from which
as from a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing world
without, and, apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman--


  Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,
  How curious you are to me!--


resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew.  But behold,
the absorbing scene had been imported hither.  What had been the
engrossing world had dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show;
while here, in this apparently dim and unimpassioned place, novelty
had volcanically started up, as it had never, for him, started up
elsewhere.

Every window of the house being open, Clare could hear across the
yard each trivial sound of the retiring household.  The dairy-house,
so humble, so insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained
sojourn that he had never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance
to be reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever in the
landscape; what was it now?  The aged and lichened brick gables
breathed forth "Stay!"  The windows smiled, the door coaxed and
beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy.  A personality within
it was so far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make
the bricks, mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning
sensibility.  Whose was this mighty personality? A milkmaid's.

It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the
obscure dairy had become to him.  And though new love was to be held
partly responsible for this, it was not solely so.  Many besides
Angel have learnt that 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.  Looking at it thus, he found that life
was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.

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.  Upon her sensations
the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her
fellow-creatures existed, to her.  The universe itself only came into
being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which
she was born.

This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single
opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic
First Cause--her all; her every and only chance.  How then should he
look upon her as of less consequence than himself; as a pretty trifle
to caress and grow weary of; and not deal in the greatest seriousness
with the affection which he knew that he had awakened in her--so
fervid and so impressionable as she was under her reserve--in order
that it might not agonize and wreck her?

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.  As yet the harm done was small.

But it was not easy to carry out the resolution never to approach
her.  He was driven towards her by every heave of his pulse.

He thought he would go and see his friends.  It might be possible
to sound them upon this.  In less than five months his term here
would have ended, and after a few additional months spent upon other
farms he would be fully equipped in agricultural knowledge and in
a position to start on his own account.  Would not a farmer want a
wife, and should a farmer's wife be a drawing-room wax-figure, or a
woman who understood farming?  Notwithstanding the pleasing answer
returned to him by the silence, he resolved to go his journey.

One morning when they sat down to breakfast at Talbothays Dairy some
maid observed that she had not seen anything of Mr Clare that day.

"O no," said Dairyman Crick.  "Mr Clare has gone hwome to Emminster
to spend a few days wi' his kinsfolk."

For four impassioned ones around that table the sunshine of the
morning went out at a stroke, and the birds muffled their song.
But neither girl by word or gesture revealed her blankness.  "He's
getting on towards the end of his time wi' me," added the dairyman,
with a phlegm which unconsciously was brutal; "and so I suppose he
is beginning to see about his plans elsewhere."

"How much longer is he to bide here?" asked Izz Huett, the only
one of the gloom-stricken bevy who could trust her voice with the
question.

The others waited for the dairyman's answer as if their lives hung
upon it; Retty, with parted lips, gazing on the tablecloth, Marian
with heat added to her redness, Tess throbbing and looking out at
the meads.

"Well, I can't mind the exact day without looking at my
memorandum-book," replied Crick, with the same intolerable unconcern.
"And even that may be altered a bit.  He'll bide to get a little
practice in the calving out at the straw-yard, for certain.  He'll
hang on till the end of the year I should say."

Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society--of "pleasure
girdled about with pain".  After that the blackness of unutterable
night.


At this moment of the morning Angel Clare was riding along a narrow
lane ten miles distant from the breakfasters, in the direction of
his father's Vicarage at Emminster, carrying, as well as he could,
a little basket which contained some black-puddings and a bottle of
mead, sent by Mrs Crick, with her kind respects, to his parents.  The
white lane stretched before him, and his eyes were upon it; but they
were staring into next year, and not at the lane.  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.

His father's hill-surrounded little town, the Tudor church-tower of
red stone, the clump of trees near the Vicarage, came at last into
view beneath him, and he rode down towards the well-known gate.
Casting a glance in the direction of the church before entering his
home, he beheld standing by the vestry-door a group of girls, of
ages between twelve and sixteen, apparently awaiting the arrival of
some other one, who in a moment became visible; a figure somewhat
older than the school-girls, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and
highly-starched cambric morning-gown, with a couple of books in her
hand.

Clare knew her well.  He could not be sure that she observed him; he
hoped she did not, so as to render it unnecessary that he should go
and speak to her, blameless creature that she was.  An overpowering
reluctance to greet her made him decide that she had not seen him.
The young lady was Miss Mercy Chant, the only daughter of his
father's neighbour and friend, whom it was his parents' quiet hope
that he might wed some day.  She was great at Antinomianism and
Bible-classes, and was plainly going to hold a class now.  Clare's
mind flew to the impassioned, summer-steeped heathens in the Var
Vale, their rosy faces court-patched with cow-droppings; and to one
the most impassioned of them all.

It was on the impulse of the moment that he had resolved to trot
over to Emminster, and hence had not written to apprise his mother
and father, aiming, however, to arrive about the breakfast hour,
before they should have gone out to their parish duties.  He was
a little late, and they had already sat down to the morning meal.
The group at the table jumped up to welcome him as soon as he
entered.  They were his father and mother, his brother the Reverend
Felix--curate at a town in the adjoining county, home for the inside
of a fortnight--and his other brother, the Reverend Cuthbert, the
classical scholar, and Fellow and Dean of his College, down from
Cambridge for the long vacation.  His mother appeared in a cap and
silver spectacles, and his father looked what in fact he was--an
earnest, God-fearing man, somewhat gaunt, in years about sixty-five,
his pale face lined with thought and purpose.  Over their heads hung
the picture of Angel's sister, the eldest of the family, sixteen
years his senior, who had married a missionary and gone out to
Africa.

Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty
years, has well nigh dropped out of contemporary life.  A spiritual
descendant in the direct line from Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an
Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man of Apostolic
simplicity in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his
mind once for all in the deeper questions of existence, and admitted
no further reasoning on them thenceforward.  He was regarded even by
those of his own date and school of thinking as extreme; while, on
the other hand, those totally opposed to him were unwillingly won
to admiration for his thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he
showed in dismissing all question as to principles in his energy for
applying them.  He loved Paul of Tarsus, liked St John, hated St
James as much as he dared, and regarded with mixed feelings Timothy,
Titus, and Philemon.  The New Testament was less a Christiad then a
Pauliad to his intelligence--less an argument than an intoxication.
His creed of determinism was such that it almost amounted to a
vice, and quite amounted, on its negative side, to a renunciative
philosophy which had cousinship with that of Schopenhauer and
Leopardi.  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.  Once
upon a time Angel had been so unlucky as to say to his father, in
a moment of irritation, that it might have resulted far better for
mankind if Greece had been the source of the religion of modern
civilization, and not Palestine; and his father's grief was of that
blank description which could not realize that there might lurk a
thousandth part of a truth, much less a half truth or a whole truth,
in such a proposition.  He had simply preached austerely at Angel for
some time after.  But the kindness of his heart was such that he
never resented anything for long, and welcomed his son to-day with a
smile which was as candidly sweet as a child's.

Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did not so much
as formerly feel himself one of the family gathered there.  Every
time that he returned hither he was conscious of this divergence,
and since he had last shared in the Vicarage life it had grown even
more distinctly foreign to his own than usual.  Its transcendental
aspirations--still unconsciously based on the geocentric view of
things, a zenithal paradise, a nadiral hell--were as foreign to his
own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet.
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.  The
manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner
of the drawing-room young man.  A prig would have said that he had
lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse.  Such was the
contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothays nymphs and
swains.

After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical,
well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest
fibre, such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by
the lathe of a systematic tuition.  They were both somewhat
short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass
and string they wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the
custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was
the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway, all
without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own
vision.  When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies;
and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on
their shelves.  When Correggio's Holy Families were admired, they
admired Correggio's Holy Families; when he was decried in favour
of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal
objection.

If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he noticed
their growing mental limitations.  Felix seemed to him all Church;
Cuthbert all College.  His Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the
mainsprings of the world to the one; Cambridge to the other.  Each
brother candidly recognized that there were a few unimportant score
of millions of outsiders in civilized society, persons who were
neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated
rather than reckoned with and respected.

They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their
visits to their parents.  Felix, though an offshoot from a far more
recent point in the devolution of theology than his father, was less
self-sacrificing and disinterested.  More tolerant than his father of
a contradictory opinion, in its aspect as a danger to its holder, he
was less ready than his father to pardon it as a slight to his own
teaching.  Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more liberal-minded,
though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much heart.

As they walked along the hillside Angel's former feeling revived
in him--that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself,
neither saw or set forth life as it really was lived.  Perhaps, as
with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good
as their opportunities of expression.  Neither had an adequate
conception of the complicated forces at work outside the smooth and
gentle current in which they and their associates floated.  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.

"I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear fellow,"
Felix was saying, among other things, to his youngest brother, as
he looked through his spectacles at the distant fields with sad
austerity.  "And, therefore, we must make the best of it.  But I do
entreat you to endeavour to keep as much as possible in touch with
moral ideals.  Farming, of course, means roughing it externally; but
high thinking may go with plain living, nevertheless."

"Of course it may," said Angel.  "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?"

"Well, I fancied, from the tone of your letters and our
conversation--it may be fancy only--that you were somehow losing
intellectual grasp.  Hasn't it struck you, Cuthbert?"

"Now, Felix," said Angel drily, "we are very good friends, you
know; each of us treading our allotted circles; but if it comes to
intellectual grasp, I think you, as a contented dogmatist, had
better leave mine alone, and inquire what has become of yours."

They returned down the hill to dinner, which was fixed at any time at
which their father's and mother's morning work in the parish usually
concluded.  Convenience as regarded afternoon callers was the last
thing to enter into the consideration of unselfish Mr and Mrs Clare;
though the three sons were sufficiently in unison on this matter to
wish that their parents would conform a little to modern notions.

The walk had made them hungry, Angel in particular, who was now
an outdoor man, accustomed to the profuse _dapes inemptae_ of the
dairyman's somewhat coarsely-laden table.  But neither of the old
people had arrived, and it was not till the sons were almost tired of
waiting that their parents entered.  The self-denying pair had been
occupied in coaxing the appetites of some of their sick parishioners,
whom they, somewhat inconsistently, tried to keep imprisoned in the
flesh, their own appetites being quite forgotten.

The family sat down to table, and a frugal meal of cold viands
was deposited before them.  Angel looked round for Mrs Crick's
black-puddings, which he had directed to be nicely grilled as they
did them at the dairy, and of which he wished his father and mother
to appreciate the marvellous herbal savours as highly as he did
himself.

"Ah! you are looking for the black-puddings, my dear boy," observed
Clare's mother.  "But I am sure you will not mind doing without them
as I am sure your father and I shall not, when you know the reason.
I suggested to him that we should take Mrs Crick's kind present to
the children of the man who can earn nothing just now because of his
attacks of delirium tremens; and he agreed that it would be a great
pleasure to them; so we did."

"Of course," said Angel cheerfully, looking round for the mead.

"I found the mead so extremely alcoholic," continued his mother,
"that it was quite unfit for use as a beverage, but as valuable
as rum or brandy in an emergency; so I have put it in my
medicine-closet."

"We never drink spirits at this table, on principle," added his
father.

"But what shall I tell the dairyman's wife?" said Angel.

"The truth, of course," said his father.

"I rather wanted to say we enjoyed the mead and the black-puddings
very much.  She is a kind, jolly sort of body, and is sure to ask me
directly I return."

"You cannot, if we did not," Mr Clare answered lucidly.

"Ah--no; though that mead was a drop of pretty tipple."

"A what?" said Cuthbert and Felix both.

"Oh--'tis an expression they use down at Talbothays," replied Angel,
blushing.  He felt that his parents were right in their practice if
wrong in their want of sentiment, and said no more.



Chapter XXV
Angel visits his family at the parsonage in Emminster to think and to tell his parents about his plans to marry Tess. He finds them at breakfast with his brothers Felix, a village curate, and Cuthbert, a Cambridge dean. They notice that Angel has taken on the crude mannerisms of the farm, and he realizes that they have become frozen intellectually. Angel's mother gives away the meat puddings Mrs. Crick prepared as a gift and puts the mead in the medicine cabinet because it is too strong to drink