finished_summaries/gradesaver/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_2_part_3.txt
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 18
chapter 18
{"name": "Chapter 18", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210410060617/https://www.gradesaver.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/study-guide/summary-phase-3-chapters-16-24", "summary": "Angel Clare has a nebulous, preoccupied quality, for he is a man with no very definite aim or concern about his material future. The youngest son of his father, a poor parson, he is at Talbothays to acquire a practical skill in the various processes of farming. His father had married his mother late in life, and his brothers had each acquired a university degree, even though Angel was the one whose promise might have done full justice to academic training. Before Angel met Tess at the dance in Marlott years before, a parcel came to Reverend Clare from the bookseller. This book was a philosophical work that prompts an argument between Angel and his father in which he admits that he does not want to be a minister. Since he was not to be ordained, Mr. Clare did not send Angel to Cambridge. Angel instead spent years in desultory studies, undertakings and meditations, beginning to evince considerable indifference to social forms and observances. He began to despise the distinctions of rank and wealth. Angel now takes great delight in the companionship at Talbothays: the conventional farm-folk of his imagination were obliterated in favor of more respectable people. Angel had grown away from old associations and now sees something new in life and humanity, making close acquaintance with natural phenomena. Tess and Angel discuss whether or not one's soul can leave his body while alive, and he finds her to be a fresh and virginal daughter of nature. He seems to discern in her something familiar that carries him back to a joyous past.", "analysis": "Hardy shifts the focus of the novel for this chapter, leaving his constant focus on Tess Durbeyfield for the first time to give biographical information about Angel Clare. Hardy gives greater indication that Angel Clare is a man with unconventional moral and religious views; in contrast to the narrow religious beliefs of his father, Angel is open to other moral belief systems and it is this difference of opinion that leads Angel not to attend college and enter the clergy as his father expected. Angel's political beliefs coincidence with his unconventional religious beliefs; he does not believe in the primacy of rank and social status, beliefs which clash with traditional English mores. This disdain for polite social behavior complements Tess's equal disregard for convention, thus setting up greater similarities between the two characters. Nevertheless, even at this early point Hardy foreshadows later problems between Tess and Angel. Angel idealizes Tess as a \"fresh and virginal daughter of nature,\" a characterization that obvious clashes with her more sordid past. The knowledge that Tess does not represent the qualities he exalts in her will provide area for conflict within the novel, while allowing for the theme of the permanence of sins. At this point in the novel, Hardy indicates that Tess has found a new purity and innocence after her troubled history with Alec d'Urberville; however, others may find that her earlier actions have permanently tainted Tess"}


Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a distinct
figure, but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed,
abstracted eyes, and a mobility of mouth somewhat too small and
delicately lined for a man's, though with an unexpectedly firm close
of the lower lip now and then; enough to do away with any inference
of indecision.  Nevertheless, something nebulous, preoccupied, vague,
in his bearing and regard, marked him as one who probably had no very
definite aim or concern about his material future.  Yet as a lad
people had said of him that he was one who might do anything if he
tried.

He was the youngest son of his father, a poor parson at the other end
of the county, and had arrived at Talbothays Dairy as a six months'
pupil, after going the round of some other farms, his object being
to acquire a practical skill in the various processes of farming,
with a view either to the Colonies or the tenure of a home-farm, as
circumstances might decide.

His entry into the ranks of the agriculturists and breeders was a
step in the young man's career which had been anticipated neither
by himself nor by others.

Mr Clare the elder, whose first wife had died and left him a
daughter, married a second late in life.  This lady had somewhat
unexpectedly brought him three sons, so that between Angel, the
youngest, and his father the Vicar there seemed to be almost a
missing generation.  Of these boys the aforesaid Angel, the child of
his old age, was the only son who had not taken a University degree,
though he was the single one of them whose early promise might have
done full justice to an academical training.

Some two or three years before Angel's appearance at the Marlott
dance, on a day when he had left school and was pursuing his studies
at home, a parcel came to the Vicarage from the local bookseller's,
directed to the Reverend James Clare.  The Vicar having opened it and
found it to contain a book, read a few pages; whereupon he jumped up
from his seat and went straight to the shop with the book under his
arm.

"Why has this been sent to my house?" he asked peremptorily, holding
up the volume.

"It was ordered, sir."

"Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I am happy to say."

The shopkeeper looked into his order-book.

"Oh, it has been misdirected, sir," he said.  "It was ordered by Mr
Angel Clare, and should have been sent to him."

Mr Clare winced as if he had been struck.  He went home pale and
dejected, and called Angel into his study.

"Look into this book, my boy," he said.  "What do you know about it?"

"I ordered it," said Angel simply.

"What for?"

"To read."

"How can you think of reading it?"

"How can I?  Why--it is a system of philosophy.  There is no more
moral, or even religious, work published."

"Yes--moral enough; I don't deny that.  But religious!--and for YOU,
who intend to be a minister of the Gospel!"

"Since you have alluded to the matter, father," said the son, with
anxious thought upon his face, "I should like to say, once for
all, that I should prefer not to take Orders.  I fear I could not
conscientiously do so.  I love the Church as one loves a parent.
I shall always have the warmest affection for her.  There is no
institution for whose history I have a deeper admiration; but I
cannot honestly be ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while
she refuses to liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive
theolatry."

It had never occurred to the straightforward and simple-minded Vicar
that one of his own flesh and blood could come to this!  He was
stultified, shocked, paralysed.  And if Angel were not going to
enter the Church, what was the use of sending him to Cambridge?  The
University as a step to anything but ordination seemed, to this man
of fixed ideas, a preface without a volume.  He was a man not merely
religious, but devout; a firm believer--not as the phrase is now
elusively construed by theological thimble-riggers in the Church and
out of it, but in the old and ardent sense of the Evangelical school:
one who could


              Indeed opine
        That the Eternal and Divine
        Did, eighteen centuries ago
        In very truth...


Angel's father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty.

"No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four (leave alone the rest),
taking it 'in the literal and grammatical sense' as required by the
Declaration; and, therefore, I can't be a parson in the present state
of affairs," said Angel.  "My whole instinct in matters of religion
is towards reconstruction; to quote your favorite Epistle to the
Hebrews, 'the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things
that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.'"

His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite ill to see him.

"What is the good of your mother and me economizing and stinting
ourselves to give you a University education, if it is not to be used
for the honour and glory of God?" his father repeated.

"Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of man, father."

Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to Cambridge like
his brothers.  But the Vicar's view of that seat of learning as a
stepping-stone to Orders alone was quite a family tradition; and so
rooted was the idea in his mind that perseverance began to appear to
the sensitive son akin to an intent to misappropriate a trust, and
wrong the pious heads of the household, who had been and were, as his
father had hinted, compelled to exercise much thrift to carry out
this uniform plan of education for the three young men.

"I will do without Cambridge," said Angel at last.  "I feel that I
have no right to go there in the circumstances."

The effects of this decisive debate were not long in showing
themselves.  He spent years and years in desultory studies,
undertakings, and meditations; he began to evince considerable
indifference to social forms and observances.  The material
distinctions of rank and wealth he increasingly despised.  Even the
"good old family" (to use a favourite phrase of a late local worthy)
had no aroma for him unless there were good new resolutions in its
representatives.  As a balance to these austerities, when he went to
live in London to see what the world was like, and with a view to
practising a profession or business there, he was carried off his
head, and nearly entrapped by a woman much older than himself, though
luckily he escaped not greatly the worse for the experience.

Early association with country solitudes had bred in him an
unconquerable, and almost unreasonable, aversion to modern town life,
and shut him out from such success as he might have aspired to by
following a mundane calling in the impracticability of the spiritual
one.  But something had to be done; he had wasted many valuable
years; and having an acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life
as a Colonial farmer, it occurred to Angel that this might be a lead
in the right direction.  Farming, either in the Colonies, America, or
at home--farming, at any rate, after becoming well qualified for the
business by a careful apprenticeship--that was a vocation which would
probably afford an independence without the sacrifice of what he
valued even more than a competency--intellectual liberty.

So we find Angel Clare at six-and-twenty here at Talbothays as a
student of kine, and, as there were no houses near at hand in which
he could get a comfortable lodging, a boarder at the dairyman's.

His room was an immense attic which ran the whole length of the
dairy-house.  It could only be reached by a ladder from the
cheese-loft, and had been closed up for a long time till he arrived
and selected it as his retreat.  Here Clare had plenty of space, and
could often be heard by the dairy-folk pacing up and down when the
household had gone to rest.  A portion was divided off at one end by
a curtain, behind which was his bed, the outer part being furnished
as a homely sitting-room.

At first he lived up above entirely, reading a good deal, and
strumming upon an old harp which he had bought at a sale, saying when
in a bitter humour that he might have to get his living by it in the
streets some day.  But he soon preferred to read human nature by
taking his meals downstairs in the general dining-kitchen, with the
dairyman and his wife, and the maids and men, who all together formed
a lively assembly; for though but few milking hands slept in the
house, several joined the family at meals.  The longer Clare resided
here the less objection had he to his company, and the more did he
like to share quarters with them in common.

Much to his surprise he took, indeed, a real delight in their
companionship.  The conventional farm-folk of his imagination--
personified in the newspaper-press by the pitiable dummy known as
Hodge--were obliterated after a few days' residence.  At close
quarters no Hodge was to be seen.  At first, it is true, when Clare's
intelligence was fresh from a contrasting society, these friends with
whom he now hobnobbed seemed a little strange.  Sitting down as a
level member of the dairyman's household seemed at the outset an
undignified proceeding.  The ideas, the modes, the surroundings,
appeared retrogressive and unmeaning.  But with living on there,
day after day, the acute sojourner became conscious of a new aspect
in the spectacle.  Without any objective change whatever, variety
had taken the place of monotonousness.  His host and his host's
household, his men and his maids, as they became intimately known to
Clare, began to differentiate themselves as in a chemical process.
The thought of Pascal's was brought home to him: "_A mesure qu'on a
plus d'esprit, on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux.  Les
gens du commun ne trouvent pas de difference entre les hommes._"
The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased to exist.  He had been
disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-creatures--beings of
many minds, beings infinite in difference; some happy, many serene, a
few depressed, one here and there bright even to genius, some stupid,
others wanton, others austere; some mutely Miltonic, some potentially
Cromwellian--into men who had private views of each other, as he had
of his friends; who could applaud or condemn each other, amuse or
sadden themselves by the contemplation of each other's foibles or
vices; men every one of whom walked in his own individual way the
road to dusty death.

Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake,
and for what it brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed
career.  Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the
chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with
the decline of belief in a beneficent Power.  For the first time of
late years he could read as his musings inclined him, without any eye
to cramming for a profession, since the few farming handbooks which
he deemed it desirable to master occupied him but little time.

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and
humanity.  Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena
which he had before known but darkly--the seasons in their moods,
morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different
tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices
of inanimate things.


The early mornings were still sufficiently cool to render a fire
acceptable in the large room wherein they breakfasted; and, by
Mrs Crick's orders, who held that he was too genteel to mess at
their table, it was Angel Clare's custom to sit in the yawning
chimney-corner during the meal, his cup-and-saucer and plate being
placed on a hinged flap at his elbow.  The light from the long, wide,
mullioned window opposite shone in upon his nook, and, assisted by a
secondary light of cold blue quality which shone down the chimney,
enabled him to read there easily whenever disposed to do so.  Between
Clare and the window was the table at which his companions sat, their
munching profiles rising sharp against the panes; while to the side
was the milk-house door, through which were visible the rectangular
leads in rows, full to the brim with the morning's milk.  At the
further end the great churn could be seen revolving, and its
slip-slopping heard--the moving power being discernible through the
window in the form of a spiritless horse walking in a circle and
driven by a boy.

For several days after Tess's arrival Clare, sitting abstractedly
reading from some book, periodical, or piece of music just come by
post, hardly noticed that she was present at table.  She talked so
little, and the other maids talked so much, that the babble did not
strike him as possessing a new note, and he was ever in the habit
of neglecting the particulars of an outward scene for the general
impression.  One day, however, when he had been conning one of his
music-scores, and by force of imagination was hearing the tune in
his head, he lapsed into listlessness, and the music-sheet rolled
to the hearth.  He looked at the fire of logs, with its one flame
pirouetting on the top in a dying dance after the breakfast-cooking
and boiling, and it seemed to jig to his inward tune; also at the two
chimney crooks dangling down from the cotterel, or cross-bar, plumed
with soot, which quivered to the same melody; also at the half-empty
kettle whining an accompaniment.  The conversation at the table mixed
in with his phantasmal orchestra till he thought: "What a fluty voice
one of those milkmaids has!  I suppose it is the new one."

Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.

She was not looking towards him.  Indeed, owing to his long silence,
his presence in the room was almost forgotten.

"I don't know about ghosts," she was saying; "but I do know that our
souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive."

The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged
with serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were
breakfasts here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of
a gallows.

"What--really now?  And is it so, maidy?" he said.

"A very easy way to feel 'em go," continued Tess, "is to lie on the
grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by
fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds
and hundreds o' miles away from your body, which you don't seem to
want at all."

The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed it on his
wife.

"Now that's a rum thing, Christianer--hey?  To think o' the miles
I've vamped o' starlight nights these last thirty year, courting, or
trading, or for doctor, or for nurse, and yet never had the least
notion o' that till now, or feeled my soul rise so much as an inch
above my shirt-collar."

The general attention being drawn to her, including that of the
dairyman's pupil, Tess flushed, and remarking evasively that it was
only a fancy, resumed her breakfast.

Clare continued to observe her.  She soon finished her eating, and
having a consciousness that Clare was regarding her, began to trace
imaginary patterns on the tablecloth with her forefinger with the
constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched.

"What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is!" he
said to himself.

And then he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar,
something which carried him back into a joyous and unforeseeing past,
before the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens gray.  He
concluded that he had beheld her before; where he could not tell.  A
casual encounter during some country ramble it certainly had been,
and he was not greatly curious about it.  But the circumstance was
sufficient to lead him to select Tess in preference to the other
pretty milkmaids when he wished to contemplate contiguous womankind.



Chapter 18
Angel Clare has a nebulous, preoccupied quality, for he is a man with no very definite aim or concern about his material future. The youngest son of his father, a poor parson, he is at Talbothays to acquire a practical skill in the various processes of farming. His father had married his mother late in life, and his brothers had each acquired a university degree, even though Angel was the one whose promise might have done full justice to academic training. Before Angel met Tess at the dance in Marlott years before, a parcel came to Reverend Clare from the bookseller. This book was a philosophical work that prompts an argument between Angel and his father in which he admits that he does not want to be a minister. Since he was not to be ordained, Mr. Clare did not send Angel to Cambridge. Angel instead spent years in desultory studies, undertakings and meditations, beginning to evince considerable indifference to social forms and observances. He began to despise the distinctions of rank and wealth. Angel now takes great delight in the companionship at Talbothays: the conventional farm-folk of his imagination were obliterated in favor of more respectable people. Angel had grown away from old associations and now sees something new in life and humanity, making close acquaintance with natural phenomena. Tess and Angel discuss whether or not one's soul can leave his body while alive, and he finds her to be a fresh and virginal daughter of nature. He seems to discern in her something familiar that carries him back to a joyous past.
Hardy shifts the focus of the novel for this chapter, leaving his constant focus on Tess Durbeyfield for the first time to give biographical information about Angel Clare. Hardy gives greater indication that Angel Clare is a man with unconventional moral and religious views; in contrast to the narrow religious beliefs of his father, Angel is open to other moral belief systems and it is this difference of opinion that leads Angel not to attend college and enter the clergy as his father expected. Angel's political beliefs coincidence with his unconventional religious beliefs; he does not believe in the primacy of rank and social status, beliefs which clash with traditional English mores. This disdain for polite social behavior complements Tess's equal disregard for convention, thus setting up greater similarities between the two characters. Nevertheless, even at this early point Hardy foreshadows later problems between Tess and Angel. Angel idealizes Tess as a "fresh and virginal daughter of nature," a characterization that obvious clashes with her more sordid past. The knowledge that Tess does not represent the qualities he exalts in her will provide area for conflict within the novel, while allowing for the theme of the permanence of sins. At this point in the novel, Hardy indicates that Tess has found a new purity and innocence after her troubled history with Alec d'Urberville; however, others may find that her earlier actions have permanently tainted Tess