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Updated: June 30, 2025
There momentarily flashed through his mind that the family tradition of the coach and murder might have arisen because the d'Urbervilles had been known to do these things. As well as his confused and excited ideas could reason, he supposed that in the moment of mad grief of which she spoke, her mind had lost its balance, and plunged her into this abyss.
As they drove on, the fragment of an old manor house of Caroline date rose against the sky, and was in due course passed and left behind. "That," he observed, to entertain her, "is an interesting old place one of the several seats which belonged to an ancient Norman family formerly of great influence in this county, the d'Urbervilles. I never pass one of their residences without thinking of them.
'Twas said that my gr't-granfer 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."
"Mother asked me to come," Tess continued; "and, indeed, I was in the mind to do so myself likewise. But I did not think it would be like this. I came, sir, to tell you that we are of the same family as you." "Ho! Poor relations?" "Yes." "Stokes?" "No; d'Urbervilles." "Ay, ay; I mean d'Urbervilles." "Our names are worn away to Durbeyfield; but we have several proofs that we are d'Urbervilles.
He professed not to care for Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure," though nothing could have been more obscure to him than the book itself or the author thereof, and agreed with the delightful Mrs. Pollock that "The Mayor of Casterbridge" was an infinitely better piece of work than "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." As for the American writers, he admitted a shameful ignorance about them.
Love is dead in me, generosity, humanity, imagination is dead, everything but one wild-beast passion; and I find myself panting as I read: "Get some money! Get some money! Hold on to it!" After a while I think suddenly: "And I am a poet!" That brings a moan from me and I sit shuddering. March 7th. Tess of the D'Urbervilles is one of the most unconvincing books I ever read.
"Tess of the D'Urbervilles" is as false as "Lorna Doone" or "Plain Tales from the Hills." Life, large, chaotic, inexpressible, not to be bound down by a formula, peeps at itself through the brain of each artist, but eludes photography. This is the true inwardness of the Proteus myth.
Parson Tringham had spoken truly when he said that our shambling John Durbeyfield was the only really lineal representative of the old d'Urberville family existing in the county, or near it; he might have added, what he knew very well, that the Stoke-d'Urbervilles were no more d'Urbervilles of the true tree then he was himself.
I picked up Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and I found myself in the midst of the same misery that haunts me here. I read it, but it did not help me. It is strange what poverty has ground into my soul. I find myself reading such a book with but one feeling, one idea crying out in me. I discover that my whole being is reduced to the great elemental, primitive instinct of self-preservation.
The really great novels are "Far From the Madding Crowd," "The Return of the Native," "The Mayor of Casterbridge" and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles": when he shifts the scene to London, as in "The Hand of Ethelberta" or introduces sophisticated types as in the dull "Laodicean," it means comparative failure.
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