Essays on Modern Novelists Page 2

  II

  THOMAS HARDY

  The father of Thomas Hardy wished his son to enter the church, and thisobject was the remote goal of his early education. At just what periodin the boy's mental development Christianity took on the form of ameaningless fable, we shall perhaps never know; but after a time heceased to have even the faith of a grain of mustard seed. This absenceof religious belief has proved no obstacle to many another candidate forthe Christian ministry, as every habitual church-goer knows; or as anyson of Belial may discover for himself by merely reading the prospectusof summer schools of theology. There has, however, always been a certaincold, mathematical precision in Mr. Hardy's way of thought that wouldhave made him as uncomfortable in the pulpit as he would have been in aneditor's chair, writing for salary persuasive articles containing theexact opposite of his individual convictions. But, although the beautyof holiness failed to impress his mind, the beauty of the sanctuary wassufficiently obvious to his sense of Art. He became an ecclesiasticalarchitect, and for some years his delight was in the courts of the Lord.Instead of composing sermons in ink, he made sermons in stones,restoring to many a decaying edifice the outlines that the originalbuilder had seen in his vision centuries ago. For no one has everregarded ancient churches with more sympathy and reverence than Mr.Hardy. No man to-day has less respect for God and more devotion to Hishouse.

  Mr. Hardy's professional career as an architect extended over a periodof about thirteen years, from the day when the seventeen-year-old boybecame articled, to about 1870, when he forsook the pencil for the pen.His strict training as an architect has been of enormous service to himin the construction of his novels, for skill in constructive drawing hasrepeatedly proved its value in literature. Rossetti achieved positivegreatness as an artist and as a poet. Stevenson's studies in engineeringwere not lost time, and Mr. De Morgan affords another good illustrationof the same fact. Thackeray was unconsciously learning the art of thenovelist while he was making caricatures, and the lesser Thackeray of alater day--George du Maurier--found the transition from one art to theother a natural progression. Hopkinson Smith and Frederic Remington, ona lower but dignified plane, bear witness to the same truth. Indeed,when one studies carefully the beginnings of the work of imaginativewriters, one is surprised at the great number who have handled anartist's or a draughtsman's pencil. A prominent and successfulplaywright of to-day has said that if he were not writing plays, heshould not dream of writing books; he would be building bridges.

  Mr. Hardy's work as an ecclesiastical architect laid the realfoundations of his success as a novelist; for it gave him an intimatefamiliarity with the old monuments and rural life of Wessex, and at thesame time that eye for precision of form that is so noticeable in allhis books. He has really never ceased to be an architect. Architecturehas contributed largely to the matter and to the style of his stories.Two architects appear in his first novel. In _A Pair of Blue Eyes_Stephen Smith is a professional architect, and in coming to restore theold Western Church he was simply repeating the experience of hiscreator. No one of Mr. Hardy's novels contains more of the facts of hisown life than _A Laodicean_, which was composed on what the author thenbelieved to be his death-bed; it was mainly dictated, which I thinkpartly accounts for its difference in style from the other tales. Thehero, Somerset, is an architect whose first meeting with his futurewife occurs through his professional curiosity concerning the castle;and a considerable portion of the early chapters is taken up witharchitectural detail, and of his enforced rivalry with a competitor inthe scheme for restoration. Not only does Mr. Hardy's scientificprofession speak through the mouths of his characters, but old andbeautiful buildings adorn his pages as they do the landscape he loves.In _Two on a Tower_ the ancient structure appears here and there in thestory as naturally and incidentally as it would to a pedestrian in theneighbourhood; in _A Pair of Blue Eyes_ the church tower plays animportant part in a thrilling episode, and its fall emphasises aScripture text in a diabolical manner. The old church at Weatherbury isso closely associated with the life history of the men and women in _Farfrom the Madding Crowd_ that as one stands in front of it to-day thepeople seem to gather again about its portal....

  But while Mr. Hardy has drawn freely on his knowledge of architecture infurnishing animate and inanimate material for his novels, the greatresults of his youthful training are seen in a more subtle andprofounder influence. The intellectual delight that we receive in theperusal of his books--a delight that sometimes makes us impatient withthe work of feebler authors--comes largely from the architectonics ofhis literary structures. One never loses sight of Hardy the architect.In purely constructive skill he has surpassed all his contemporaries.His novels--with the exception of _Desperate Remedies_ and _Jude theObscure_--are as complete and as beautiful to contemplate as asculptor's masterpiece. They are finished and noble works of art, andgive the same kind of pleasure to the mind as any superbly perfectoutline. Mr. Hardy himself firmly believes that the novel should firstof all be a story: that it should not be a thesis, nor a collection ofreminiscences or _obiter dicta_. He insists that a novel should be asmuch of a whole as a living organism, where all the parts--plot,dialogue, character, and scenery--should be fitly framed together,giving the single impression of a completely harmonious building. Onesimply cannot imagine him writing in the manner of a German novelist,with absolutely no sense of proportion; nor like the mighty Tolstoi, whosteadily sacrifices Art on the altar of Reality; nor like the greatEnglish school represented by Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, and DeMorgan, whose charm consists in their intimacy with the reader; theywill interrupt the narrative constantly to talk it over with the merestbystander, thus gaining his affection while destroying the illusion. Mr.Hardy's work shows a sad sincerity, the noble austerity of the trueartist, who feels the dignity of his art and is quite willing to let itspeak for itself.

  His earliest novel, _Desperate Remedies_, is more like an architect'sfirst crude sketch than a complete and detailed drawing. Strength,originality, and a thoroughly intelligent design are perfectly clear;one feels the impelling mind behind the product. But it resembles the_plan_ of a good novel rather than a novel itself. The lines are hard;there is a curious rigidity about the movement of the plot whichproceeds in jerks, like a machine that requires frequent winding up. Themanuscript was submitted to a publishing firm, who, it is interesting toremember, handed it over to their professional reader, George Meredith.Mr. Meredith told the young author that his work was promising; and hesaid it in such a way that the two men became life-long friends, therebeing no more jealousy between them than existed between Tennyson andBrowning. Years later Mr. Meredith said that he regarded Mr. Hardy asthe real leader of contemporary English novelists; and the younger manalways maintained toward his literary adviser an attitude of sincerereverence, of which his poem on the octogenarian's death was a beautifulexpression. There is something fine in the honest friendship and mutualadmiration of two giants, who cordially recognise each other above theheads of the crowd, and who are themselves placidly unmoved by thefierce jealousy of their partisans. In this instance, despite a totalunlikeness in literary style, there was genuine intellectual kinship.Mr. Meredith and Mr. Hardy were both Pagans and regarded the world andmen and women from the Pagan standpoint, though the deduction in onecase was optimism and in the other pessimism. Given the premises, theyounger writer's conclusions seem more logical; and the processes of hismind were always more orderly than those of his brilliant and irregularsenior. There is little doubt (I think) as to which of the two shouldrank higher in the history of English fiction, where fineness of Artsurely counts for something. Mr. Hardy is a great novelist; whereas toadapt a phrase that Arnold applied to Emerson, I should say that Mr.Meredith was not a great novelist; he was a great man who wrote novels.

  Immediately after the publication of _Desperate Remedies_, which seemedto teach him, as _Endymion_ taught Keats, the highest mysteries of hisart, Mr. Hardy entered upon a period of brilliant and splendidproduction. In three su
ccessive years, 1872, 1873, and 1874, he producedthree masterpieces--_Under the Greenwood Tree_, _A Pair of Blue Eyes_,and _Far from the Madding Crowd_; followed four years later by what is,perhaps, his greatest contribution to literature, _The Return of theNative_. Even in literary careers that last a long time, there seem tobe golden days when the inspiration is unbalked by obstacles. It isinteresting to contemplate the lengthy row of Scott's novels, and thento remember that _The Heart of Midlothian_, _The Bride of Lammermoor_and _Ivanhoe_ were published in three successive years; to recall thatthe same brief span covered in George Eliot's work the production of_Scenes of Clerical Life_, _Adam Bede_, and _The Mill on the Floss_; andone has only to compare what Mr. Kipling accomplished in 1888, 1889, and1890 with any other triennial, to discover when he had what theMethodists call "liberty." Mr. Hardy's career as a writer has coveredabout forty years; omitting his collections of short tales, he haswritten fourteen novels; from 1870 to 1880, inclusive, seven appeared;from 1881 to 1891, five; from 1892 to 1902, two; since 1897 he haspublished no novels at all. With that singular and unfortunateperversity which makes authors proudest of their lamest offspring, Mr.Hardy has apparently abandoned the novel for poetry and the poeticdrama. I suspect that praise of his verse is sweeter to him than praiseof his fiction; but, although his poems are interesting for their ideas,and although we all like the huge _Dynasts_ better than we did when wefirst saw it, it is a great pity from the economic point of view thatthe one man who can write novels better than anybody else in the samelanguage should deliberately choose to write something else in which heis at his very best only second rate. The world suffers the same kind ofeconomic loss (less only in degree) that it suffered when Milton spenttwenty years of his life in writing prose; and when Tolstoi forsooknovels for theology.

  It is probable that one reason why Mr. Hardy quit novel-writing was thehostile reception that greeted _Jude the Obscure_. Every great author,except Tennyson, has been able to endure adverse criticism, whether hehits back, like Pope and Byron, or whether he proceeds on his way insilence. But no one has ever enjoyed or ever will enjoymisrepresentation; and there is no doubt that the writer of _Jude_ feltthat he had been cruelly misunderstood. It is, I think, the worst novelhe has ever written, both from the moral and from the artistic point ofview; but the novelist was just as sincere in his intention as when hewrote the earlier books. The difficulty is that something of the samechange had taken place in his work that is so noticeable in that ofBjoernson; he had ceased to be a pure artist and had become apropagandist. The fault that marred the splendid novel _Tess of theD'Urbervilles_ ruined _Jude the Obscure_. When Mr. Hardy wrote on thetitle-page of _Tess_ the words, "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented," heissued defiantly the name of a thesis which the story (great, in spiteof this) was intended to defend. To a certain extent, his interest inthe argument blinded his artistic sense; otherwise he would never havecommitted the error of hanging his heroine. The mere hanging of aheroine may not be in itself an artistic blunder, for Shakespeare hangedCordelia. But Mr. Hardy executed Tess because he was bound to see histhesis through. In the prefaces to subsequent editions the author turnedon his critics, calling them "sworn discouragers of effort," a phrasethat no doubt some of them deserved; and then, like many another man whobelieves in himself, he punished both critics and the public in theRehoboam method by issuing _Jude the Obscure_. Instead of being amasterpiece of despair, like _The Return of the Native_, this book is ashriek of rage. Pessimism, which had been a noble ground quality of hisearlier writings, is in _Jude_ merely hysterical and whollyunconvincing. The author takes obvious pains to make things come outwrong; as in melodramas and childish romances, the law of causation issuspended in the interest of the hero's welfare. Animalism, which hadpartially disfigured _Tess_, became gross and revolting in _Jude_; andthe representation of marriage and the relations between men and women,instead of being a picture of life, resembled a caricature. It is amatter of sincere regret that Mr. Hardy has stopped novel-writing, butwe want no more _Judes_. Didactic pessimism is not good for the novel.

  _The Well-Beloved_, published in 1897, but really a revision of anearlier tale, is in a way a triumph of Art. The plot is simply absurd,almost as whimsical as anything in _Alice in Wonderland_. A man proposesto a young girl and is rejected; when her daughter is grown, he proposesto the representative of the second generation, and with the same illfortune. When _her_ daughter reaches maturity, he tries the third womanin line and without success. His perseverance was equalled only by hisbad luck, as so often happens in Mr. Hardy's stories. And yet, with aplot that would wreck any other novelist, the author constructed apowerful and beautifully written novel. It is as though the architecthad taken a wretched plan and yet somehow contrived to erect on itsfalse lines a handsome building. The book has naturally added nothing tohis reputation, but as a _tour de force_ it is hard to surpass.

  It is pleasant to remember that a man's opinion of his own work hasnothing to do with its final success and that his best creations cannotbe injured by his worst. Tolstoi may be ashamed of having written _AnnaKarenina_, and may insist that his sociological tracts are superiorproductions, but we know better; and rejoice in his powerlessness toefface his own masterpieces. We may honestly think that we should beashamed to put our own names to such stuff as _Little Dorrit_, but thatdoes not prevent us from admiring the splendid genius that produced_David Copperfield_ and _Great Expectations_. Mr. Hardy may believe that_Jude the Obscure_ represents his zenith as a novelist, and that hispoems are still greater literature; but one reading of _Jude_ suffices,while we never tire of rereading _Far from the Madding Crowd_ and _TheReturn of the Native_. Probably no publisher's announcement in the worldto-day would cause more pleasure to English-speaking people than theannouncement that Thomas Hardy was at work on a Wessex novel withcharacters of the familiar kind.

  For _The Dynasts_, which covers the map of Europe, transcends the sky,and deals with world-conquerors, is not nearly so great a world-drama as_A Pair of Blue Eyes_, that is circumscribed in a small corner of asmall island, and treats exclusively of a little group of commonplacepersons. Literature deals with a constant--human nature, which is thesame in Wessex as in Vienna. As the late Mr. Clyde Fitch used to say, itis not the great writers that have great things happen to them; thegreat things happen to the ordinary people they portray. Mr. Hardyselected a few of the southwestern counties of England as the stage forhis prose dramas; to this locality he for the first time, in _Far fromthe Madding Crowd_, gave the name Wessex, a name now wholly fictitious,but which his creative imagination has made so real that it isconstantly and seriously spoken of as though it were English geography.In these smiling valleys and quiet rural scenes, "while the earth keepsup her terrible composure," the farmers and milkmaids hold us spellboundas they struggle in awful passion. The author of the drama stands aloof,making no effort to guide his characters from temptation, folly, anddisaster, and offering no explanation to the spectators, who arethrilled with pity and fear. But one feels that he loves and hates hischildren as we do, and that he correctly gauges their moral value. Thevery narrowness of the scene increases the intensity of the play. Therustic cackle of his bourg drowns the murmur of the world.

  Mr. Hardy's knowledge of and sympathy with nature is of course obviousto all readers, but it is none the less impressive as we once more openbooks that we have read many times. There are incidentally few novelistswho repay one so richly for repeated perusals. He seems as inexhaustibleas nature herself, and he grows stale no faster than the repetition ofthe seasons. It is perhaps rather curious that a man who finds nature soabsolutely inexorable and indifferent to human suffering should love herso well. But every man must love something greater than himself, and asMr. Hardy had no God, he has drawn close to the world of trees, plains,and rivers. His intimacy with nature is almost uncanny. Nature is notmerely a background in his stories, it is often an active agent. Thereare striking characters in _The Return of the Native_, but the greatestcharacter in the book is Egdon Heath.
The opening chapter, which givesthe famous picture of the Heath, is like an overture to a greatmusic-drama. The _Heath-motif_ is repeated again and again in the story.It has a personality of its own, and affects the fortunes and the heartsof all human beings who dwell in its proximity. If one stands to-day onthe edge of this Heath at the twilight hour, just at the moment whenDarkness is conquering Light--the moment chosen by Mr. Hardy for thefirst chapter--one realises its significance and its possibilities. In_Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ the intercourse between man and nature isset forth with amazing power. The different seasons act as chorus to thehuman tragedy. In _The Woodlanders_ the trees seem like separateindividualities. To me a tree has become a different thing since I firstread this particular novel.

  Even before he took up the study of architecture, Mr. Hardy'sunconscious training as a novelist began. When he was a small boy, theDorchester girls found him useful in a way that recalls the services ofthat reliable child, Samuel Richardson. These village maids, in theirvarious love-affairs, which necessitated a large amount of privatecorrespondence, employed young Hardy as amanuensis. He did not, like hisgreat predecessor, compose their epistles; but he held the pen, andfaithfully recorded the inspiration of Love, as it flowed warm from thelips of passionate youth. In this manner, the almost sexless boy wasenabled to look clear-eyed into the very heart of palpitating youngwomanhood, and to express accurately its most gentle and most stormyemotions; just as the white voice of a choir-child repeats withprecision the thrilling notes of religious passion. These earlyexperiences were undoubtedly of the highest value in later years;indeed, as the boy grew a little older, it is probable that theimpression deepened. Mr. Hardy is fond of depicting the vague,half-conscious longing of a boy to be near a beautiful woman; everyonewill remember the contract between Eustacia and her youthful admirer, bywhich he was to hold her hand for a stipulated number of minutes. Mr.Hardy's women are full of tenderness and full of caprice; and whateverfeminine readers may think of them, they are usually irresistible to themasculine mind. It has been said, indeed, that he is primarily a man'snovelist, as Mrs. Ward is perhaps a woman's; he does not represent hiswomen as marvels of intellectual splendour, or in queenly dominationover the society in which they move. They are more apt to be thevictims of their own affectionate hearts. One female reader, exasperatedat this succession of portraits, wrote on the margin of one of Mr.Hardy's novels that she took from a circulating library, "Oh, how I_hate_ Thomas Hardy!" This is an interesting gloss, even if we do notadd meanly that it bears witness to the truth of the picture. Elfride,Bathsheba, Eustacia, Lady Constantine, Marty South, and Tess are ofvaried social rank and wealth; but they are all alike in humbleprostration before the man they love. Mr. Hardy takes particularpleasure in representing them as swayed by sudden and constantlychanging caprices; one has only to recall the charming BathshebaEverdene, and her various attitudes toward the three men who admireher--Troy, Boldwood, and Gabriel Oak. Mr. Hardy's heroines change theirminds oftener than they change their clothes; but in whatever materialor mental presentment, they never lack attraction. And they all resembletheir maker in one respect; at heart every one of them is a Pagan. Theyvary greatly in constancy and in general strength of character; but itis human passion, and not religion, that is the mainspring of theirlives. He has never drawn a truly spiritual woman, like Browning'sPompilia.

  His best men, from the moral point of view, are closest to the soil.Gabriel Oak, in _Far from the Madding Crowd_, and Venn, in _The Returnof the Native_, are, on the whole, his noblest characters. Oak is ashepherd and Venn is a reddleman; their sincerity, charity, and finesense of honour have never been injured by what is called politesociety. And Mr. Hardy, the stingiest author toward his characters, hasnot entirely withheld reward from these two. Henry Knight and AngelClare, who have whatever advantages civilisation is supposed to give,are certainly not villains; they are men of the loftiest ideals; but ifeach had been a deliberate black-hearted villain, he could not havetreated the innocent woman who loved him with more ugly cruelty.Compared with Oak and Venn, this precious pair of prigs are seen to haveonly the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees; a righteousnessthat is of little help in the cruel emergencies of life. Along with themmust stand Clym Yeobright, another slave to moral theory, who quitenaturally ends his days as an itinerant preacher. The real villains inMr. Hardy's novels, Sergeant Troy, young Dare, and Alec D'Urberville,seem the least natural and the most machine-made of all his characters.

  Mr. Hardy's pessimism is a picturesque and splendid contribution tomodern fiction. We should be as grateful for it in this field as we areto Schopenhauer in the domain of metaphysics. I am no pessimist myself,but I had rather read Schopenhauer than all the rest of thephilosophers put together, Plato alone excepted. The pessimism of Mr.Hardy resembles that of Schopenhauer in being absolutely thorough andabsolutely candid; it makes the world as darkly superb and as terriblyinteresting as a Greek drama. It is wholly worth while to get this pointof view; and if in practical life one does not really believe in it, itis capable of yielding much pleasure. After finishing one of Mr. Hardy'snovels, one has all the delight of waking from an impressive buthorrible dream, and feeling through the dissolving vision the realfriendliness of the good old earth. It is like coming home from anadequate performance of _King Lear_, which we would not have missed foranything. There are so many make-believe pessimists, so many whosepessimism is a sham and a pose, which will not stand for a moment in areal crisis, that we cannot withhold admiration for such pessimism asMr. Hardy's, which is fundamental and sincere. To him the Christianreligion and what we call the grace of God have not the slightest shadeof meaning; he is as absolute a Pagan as though he had written fourthousand years before Christ. This is something almost refreshing,because it is so entirely different from the hypocrisy and cant, thepretence of pessimism, so familiar to us in the works of modern writers;and so inconsistent with their daily life. Mr. Hardy's pessimism is theone deep-seated conviction of his whole intellectual process.

  I once saw a print of a cartoon drawn by a contemporary Dresden artist,Herr Sascha Schneider. It was called "The Helplessness of Man againstDestiny." We see a quite naked man, standing with his back to us; hishead is bowed in hopeless resignation; heavy manacles are about hiswrists, to which chains are attached, that lead to some fastening in theground. Directly before him, with hideous hands, that now almostentirely surround the little circle where he stands in dejection, crawlsflatly toward him a prodigious, shapeless monster, with his horridnarrow eyes fixed on his defenceless human prey. And the man is soconscious of his tether, that even in the very presence of theunspeakably awful object, _the chains hang loose_! He may have triedthem once, but he has since given up. The monster is Destiny; and thereal meaning of the picture is seen in the eyes, nose, and mouth of theloathsome beast. There is not only no sympathy and no intelligencethere; there is an expression far more terrible than the evident lust todevour; there is plainly the _sense of humour_ shown on this hideousface. The contrast between the limitless strength of the monster and theutter weakness of the man, flavours the stupidity of Destiny with thezest of humour.

  Now this is a correct picture of life as Mr. Hardy sees it. His God is akind of insane child, who cackles foolishly as he destroys the mostprecious objects. Some years ago I met a man entirely blind. He saidthat early in life he had lost the sight of one eye by an accident; andthat years later, as he held a little child on his lap, the infant, inrare good humour, playfully poked the point of a pair of scissors intothe other, thus destroying his sight for ever. So long an interval hadelapsed since this second and final catastrophe, that the man spoke ofit without the slightest excitement or resentment. The child with thescissors might well represent Hardy's conception of God. Destiny iswhimsical, rather than definitely malicious; for Destiny has notsufficient intelligence even to be systematically bad. We smile atCaliban's natural theology, as he composes his treatise on Setebos; buthis God is the same who disposes of man's proposals in the stories ofour nov
elist.

  "In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay, And he lay stupid-like,--why, I should laugh; And if he, spying me, should fall to weep, Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong, Bid his poor leg smart less or grow again,-- Well, as the chance were, this might take or else Not take my fancy.... 'Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him, Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord."

  Mr. Hardy believes that, morally, men and women are immensely superiorto God; for all the good qualities that we attribute to Him in prayerare human, not divine. He in his loneliness is totally devoid of thesense of right and wrong, and knows neither justice nor mercy. His poem_New Year's Eve_[3] clearly expresses his theology.

  [3] See Appendix.

  Mr. Hardy's pessimism is not in the least personal, nor has it risenfrom any sorrow or disappointment in his own life. It is bothphilosophic and temperamental. He cannot see nature in any other way. Toventure a guess, I think his pessimism is mainly caused by his deep,manly tenderness for all forms of human and animal life and by an almostabnormal sympathy. His intense love for bird and beast is well known;many a stray cat and hurt dog have found in him a protector and arefuge. He firmly believes that the sport of shooting is wicked, and hehas repeatedly joined in practical measures to waken the publicconscience on this subject. As a spectator of human history, he seeslife as a vast tragedy, with men and women emerging from nothingness,suffering acute physical and mental sorrow, and then passing intonothingness again. To his sympathetic mind, the creed of optimism is aribald insult to the pain of humanity and devout piety merely absurd. Tohear these suffering men and women utter prayers of devotion and singhymns of adoration to the Power whence comes all their anguish is to hima veritable abdication of reason and common sense. God simply does notdeserve it, and he for one will have the courage to say so. He will notstand by and see humanity submit so tamely to so heartless a tyrant.For, although Mr. Hardy is a pessimist, he has not the least tincture ofcynicism. If one analyses his novels carefully, one will see that heseldom shows scorn for his characters; his contempt is almostexclusively devoted to God. Sometimes the evil fate that his characterssuffer is caused by the very composition of their mind, as is seen in _APair of Blue Eyes_; again it is no positive human agency, but rather anAEschylean conception of hidden forces, as in _The Return of the Native_;but in neither case is humanity to blame.

  This pessimism has one curious effect that adds greatly to the reader'sinterest when he takes up an hitherto unread novel by our author. Themajority of works of fiction end happily; indeed, many are so badlywritten that any ending cannot be considered unfortunate. But with mostnovelists we have a sense of security. We know that, no matter whatdifficulties the hero and heroine may encounter, the unseen hand oftheir maker will guide them eventually to paths of pleasantness andpeace. Mr. Hardy inspires no such confidence. In reading Trollope, onesmiles at a cloud of danger, knowing it will soon pass over; but afterreading _A Pair of Blue Eyes_, or _Tess_, one follows the fortunes ofyoung Somerset in _A Laodicean_ with constant fluctuation of faint hopeand real terror; for we know that with Mr. Hardy the worst may happen atany moment.

  However dark may be his conception of life, Mr. Hardy's sense of humouris unexcelled by his contemporaries in its subtlety of feeling and charmof expression. His rustics, who have long received and deserved theepithet "Shakespearian," arouse in every reader harmless and wholesomedelight. The shadow of the tragedy lifts in these wonderful pages, forMr. Hardy's laughter reminds one of what Carlyle said of Shakespeare's:it is like sunshine on the deep sea. The childlike sincerity of theseshepherd farmers, the candour of their repartee and their appraisal ofgentle-folk are as irresistible as their patience and equable temper.Everyone in the community seems to find his proper mental and morallevel. And their infrequent fits of irritation are as pleasant as theirmore solemn moods. We can all sympathise (I hope) with the despair ofJoseph Poorgrass: "I was sitting at home looking for Ephesians and saysI to myself, 'Tis nothing but Corinthians and Thessalonians in thisdanged Testament!"