“My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is”
In Clym Yeobright’s face could be dimly seen
the typical countenance of the future. Should
there be a classic period to art hereafter, its Pheidias
may produce such faces. The view of life as a
thing to be put up with, replacing that zest for existence
which was so intense in early civilizations, must
ultimately enter so thoroughly into the constitution
of the advanced races that its facial expression will
become accepted as a new artistic departure. People
already feel that a man who lives without disturbing
a curve of feature, or setting a mark of mental concern
anywhere upon himself, is too far removed from modern
perceptiveness to be a modern type. Physically
beautiful men—the glory of the race when
it was young—are almost an anachronism
now; and we may wonder whether, at some time or other,
physically beautiful women may not be an anachronism
likewise.
The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive
centuries has permanently displaced the Hellenic idea
of life, or whatever it may be called. What the
Greeks only suspected we know well; what their Aeschylus
imagined our nursery children feel. That old-fashioned
revelling in the general situation grows less and less
possible as we uncover the defects of natural laws,
and see the quandary that man is in by their operation.
The lineaments which will get embodied in ideals based
upon this new recognition will probably be akin to
those of Yeobright. The observer’s eye
was arrested, not by his face as a picture, but by
his face as a page; not by what it was, but by what
it recorded. His features were attractive in
the light of symbols, as sounds intrinsically common
become attractive in language, and as shapes intrinsically
simple become interesting in writing.
He had been a lad of whom something was expected.
Beyond this all had been chaos. That he would
be successful in an original way, or that he would
go to the dogs in an original way, seemed equally probable.
The only absolute certainty about him was that he would
not stand still in the circumstances amid which he
was born.
Hence, when his name was casually mentioned by neighbouring
yeomen, the listener said, “Ah, Clym Yeobright:
what is he doing now?” When the instinctive
question about a person is, What is he doing? it is
felt that he will be found to be, like most of us,
doing nothing in particular. There is an indefinite
sense that he must be invading some region of singularity,
good or bad. The devout hope is that he is doing
well. The secret faith is that he is making a
mess of it. Half a dozen comfortable marketmen,
who were habitual callers at the Quiet Woman as they
passed by in their carts, were partial to the topic.
In fact, though they were not Egdon men, they could
hardly avoid it while they sucked their long clay
tubes and regarded the heath through the window.
Clym had been so inwoven with the heath in his boyhood
that hardly anybody could look upon it without thinking
of him. So the subject recurred: if he were
making a fortune and a name, so much the better for
him; if he were making a tragical figure in the world,
so much the better for a narrative.
