“. . . very foolish fond old man
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less,”
whose wanderings are the theme of Shakespeare’s muse.
The Return of the Native is a story of days as well as nights, of fair weather and foul, of sunshine and darkness, but it is in essence the story of a darkened stage. The description of Egdon in the opening chapter is the keynote of a mournful fugue:—
“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.”
An artist who should come to Egdon, intent upon studying its colour-scheme, would be nonplussed by the more than usual fickleness and instability of its daylight hues. Shrouded in the black repose of night, its tone is a thing of some permanence, but under the effects of sunshine he finds it now purple, now raw sienna, shading off into Prout’s Brown, and again rising to glints and fleeting stripes of rich golden yellow. It would be the despair of one who worked in the slow analytic manner of a Birket Foster, but the joy of an impressionist like a Whistler.
The extremely rich and beautiful colouring of Wool and Bere Heaths deepens with the setting of the sun to a velvety blackness and gives to the fir-crowned hills melodramatic and tragical significances. Such an one is Gallows Hill, where the road goes in a hollow formed by the massive shoulders of the tree-studded height. Here, the gossips say, with the incertitude of rustic indifference, a man hanged himself, or was hanged. When or why he committed what we have the authority of conventional old-time journalism for calling “the rash deed,” does not—in the same language—“transpire.” But certainly he selected a romantic spot for ending, for from the ragged crest, underneath one of those “clumps and stretches of fir-trees, whose notched tops are like battlemented towers crowning black-fronted castles of enchantment,” the moorland, under the different local names of Hyde Heath, Decoy Heath, and Gore Heath, but all one to the eye, goes stretching away some ten miles, to Poole Harbour, seen from this view-point, on moonlit nights, glancing like a mirror in a field of black velvet.
A juicy interlude to the summer dryness of these wastes is that dip in the road where one comes to the river Piddle at Chamberlain’s Bridge, a battered old red brick pont that, by the aid of the quietly gliding stream and the dark, boding mass of fir-crowned Mat Hill in the background, makes a memorable picture. Only when Bere Regis comes within sight are the solitudes of Egdon left behind. Steeply down goes the way into the village, down Rye Hill, past the remarkably picturesque old thatched cottage illustrated here, perched on its steep roadside bank, and so at last on to the level where Bere Church is glimpsed, standing four-square and handsome in advance of the long street, backed by dense clumps of that tree, the fir, which has so strong an affection for these sandy heaths. Here then is the introduction to the “Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill” of the Wessex novels, the “half-dead townlet . . . the spot of all spots in the world which could be considered the D’Urbervilles’ home, since they had resided there for full five hundred years.”