s 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.

The fact was that Yeobright's fame had spread to an awkward extent
before he left home. "It is bad when your fame outruns your means,"
said the Spanish Jesuit Gracian. At the age of six he had asked a
Scripture riddle: "Who was the first man known to wear breeches?"
and applause had resounded from the very verge of the heath. At
seven he painted the Battle of Waterloo with tiger-lily pollen and
black-currant juice, in the absence of water-colours. By the time
he reached twelve he had in this manner been heard of as artist
and scholar for at least two miles round. An individual whose fame
spreads three or four thousand yards in the time taken by the fame
of others similarly situated to travel six or eight hundred, must of
necessity have something in him. Possibly Clym's fame, like Homer's,
owed something to the accidents