novelists. Bathsheba Everdene, the heroine-Mr. Hardy disdains to give his heroines common names thereby linking himself to the romancers-Farmer Boldwood, Sergeant Troy, the maltster, are all excellent in their way, although inferior to the two first mentioned. But with his advance in characterization, Mr. Hardy does not fall behind, nay rather, he advances in his other qualities. Never has the life of the farm and the sheepfold been more truthfully or more charmingly described; never has the homely picturesqueness of the English peasant received so attractive a setting. The humor that welled up in "Under the Greenwood Tree," flows here in a full stream, witness Joseph Poorgrass drunk in the public house testifying to the evils of the affliction known as "a multiplying eye”—an affliction which had a way of always coming on when he had been in a public house a little while, as he meekly confessed to Shepherd Oak. In style, too, Mr. Hardy has improved. He has become more practised in his use of that noble instrument, the prose of his native tongue. There is less straining for effect, there is less dependence upon the aid of a flashing figure or epithet; in other words, there is more Sophoclean roundedness, and less Æschylean pointedness than in his earlier works.

But-and without this "Far from the Madding Crowd" would not be a great novel-there is a human interest about this story which lifts it above its predecessors. Human interest is a term used by some writers' with reference to passion rather than to action, but we here use it inclusively. It is to be remarked, however, that for a novel or a romance to be truly inspiring, the human interest that emerges from passion or suffering should not predominate. Men and women must act their parts, in the true sense of the phrase, in a novel as well as on the stage; and unless one character acts a great part, or some of the characters combine to act a great part, the novel must often fail of truly inspiring its readers. Now Farmer Oak, though in a modest way, does

'See Mr. R. G. Moulton's admirable book, "Shakspere as a Dramatic Artist" (Second Edition, pp. 272, 273).

live a great life and act a great part, and Bathsheba Everdene and Farmer Boldwood, if they do not live great lives, nevertheless go through fires of affliction that try their souls and lend them an inevitable interest. Hence it is that we place this novel among the few great novels of our generation— because even "far from the madding crowd" Mr. Hardy has seen that there is something more than the life of plant, and stone, and stream, something more than the animal life of Joseph Poorgrass and his kind-the life of men who love greatly, and endure greatly, and dare greatly like Shepherd Oak, the life of women who pass through Sloughs of Despond to reach at last the Delectable Mountains like Bathsheba Everdene.

"The Hand of Ethelberta" (1876) was described by its author as "A Comedy in Chapters." It bears out fairly well the claims of its sub-title. The heroine, Ethelberta, is a butler's daughter, who, having been educated above her station, marries a young, wealthy, and well-born husband and is soon left a fashionable widow. She now essays the difficult rôle of moving in polite society while still preserving secret relations with her family. Her sister becomes her maid, her brother her footman, and once she is actually waited on at a dinner party by her father, the butler. Naturally such a plot furnishes Mr. Hardy with much opportunity for delicate satire on fashionable society as well as for indulging in his accustomed humor. Ethelberta publishes poems, recites her own stories, loves a poor gentleman, is wooed by several eligible suitors, and finally marries a wornout peer. If it were not that she gets the upper hand of her old husband and is enabled to lift up and support her family the end of the story would be tragic, rather than comic; but, viewed as a whole, it is an amusing comedy which deserves more popularity than it seems to have had. Certainly Mr. Hardy has drawn few more interesting characters than his "squirrel haired" Ethelberta.

Two years later, 1878, appeared the book which some regard as our author's masterpiece, but to which we are in

clined to give the third place among his works—“The Return of the Native." Here again we have a rural setting and a powerful and moving plot. The characters, too, are striking and well drawn, and one of them, Clym Yeobright, the hero, just misses greatness. Unlike Mr. Hardy's previous works, it is predominantly a tragedy; but it is not a thoroughly artistic success, because our pleasure at the artist's triumph is overbalanced by disagreeable sensations caused by the repulsiveness of many of his characters and of the environment in which they move. Mr. Hardy himself must have felt the effect of this repulsiveness, for his humor is almost entirely absent. A passion for excessive realism, too, has taken a greater hold upon this essentially poetic idealist, and it is only when he is in the presence of inanimate nature that his soul appears to be truly inspired. The descriptions of Egdon Heath in this novel, and of the effects of its sombre vastness upon its scattered inhabitants, are unequalled, so far as our reading goes, in modern fiction. But if nature has taken hold of Mr. Hardy as it has done of few men since Wordsworth, it has not disturbed him "with the joy of elevated thoughts," as Wordsworth sang; it has not proved itself to be the power "whose secret is not joy, but peace" of Matthew Arnold; but rather it has proved itself to be the mysterious, inscrutable counterpart in the world of the senses, of that "insoluble enigma" with which Herbert Spencer and so many modern minds have found themselves confronted in the world of thought. In other words, Mr. Hardy seems to have fallen a victim to the malheur du siècle, and so Clym Yeobright, and his mother, and Eustacia Vye, and Wildeve, and the other characters, love their loves and hate their hates on Egdon Heath without ever seeming to think that there is any thing beyond this present life, as pagan in heart as the old Celts that built the barrow crowning the hill that overlooked the immemorial plains. Every thing about the novel is pagan from the barrow to the peasants who light a fire upon it every Guy Fawkes day; and the only truly noble character, the Reddleman, is as much

pagan as Christian in his virtues. It is just here that we can lay our finger on the radical defect of this book, a defect which we shall expect to find characterizing much of Mr. Hardy's future work. The writer of a great novel must be enough of an optimist to impart a spring to his work. Pessimism imparts no spring to any thing, and pessimism is but another name for the deadly languor that accompanies the malheur du siècle is, in fact, the symptom by which one. is usually enabled to diagnose the disease.

We do not mean to say that Mr. Hardy is a pessimist in the sense that he is an apostle of pessimism. He does not set out with the avowed intention of making his readers fall out of love with life. He sees as well as any one that there is much in human nature that is noble and true, that there is much in life that is capable of giving pure and genuine pleasure. But, as a recent critic, Mr. William Sharp, has pointed out,' there seems to be a large-eyed sadness about his face as he looks forth upon the world. He finds much that is inexplicable, much that is solemn, much that does not answer to his sense of justice in the life that surges about him, and he does not hesitate to reproduce in his novels all that he sees. As a realist he is warranted in doing this, but as a poet and idealist he ought sometimes at least to see further into the mystery we call life. If he relied more upon his poetical qualities he would avoid one of the pitfalls of realism-he has bravely escaped the others--the tendency to paint life as repulsive by stripping it of its hopefulness,, its self-sufficing energy, its spring. Shakspere, whom Mr. Hardy resembles in many ways, did not make this mistake. The Shakspere of "As You Like It" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" did, it is true, pass into the Shakspere of "Hamlet" and "Othello"-the poet of a laughing, sunny world into the poet of the passions and the storms of life. But however much he was impelled to question life and fate, Shakspere never failed to leave his hearers or

'See "The Forum" for July, 1892.

readers that hopefulness which is the spring of human existence. And in his last years, the years of "The Tempest" and "A Winter's Tale," he reached a calm serenity of spirit and a clearness of vision which makes one feel that our troubled, thoughtful novelist may perhaps in time reach a similar "coign of vantage" from which to survey the world. If, as we shall see, Mr. Hardy has written in "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" a tragedy which instinctively suggests such tragedies as the "Lear" and the "Othello," who shall say that he may not in the years to come write a story of our modern life which shall suggest something of the wisdom, the genial charm of "The Tempest?"—even if he still finds it necessary to close with a note as solemn as

"We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

The reader of Mr. Hardy's next novel, "The Trumpet Major," published in 1880, will at once ask himself, "Is not this author making a brave struggle against the scepticism, the pessimism that have been assailing him? Will not the optimism of the poet and idealist finally conquer the pessimism of the realist?" If Mr. Hardy had died after writing "The Trumpet Major" the last question might well have been answered in the affirmative. Few more charming, spontaneous, wholesome stories than this have ever been written by an English novelist. Sweet Anne Garland may well be set by Sweet Anne Page, and her two devoted swains, fickle Bob Loveday, the sailor, and staunch John Loveday, the Trumpet Major, are worthy to live as long as the language in which their adventures are told. This is the only one of Mr. Hardy's stories that at all claims the title the great title in spite of some modern critics—of an historical romance. The scene is laid on the southern coast of England during the exciting days of Napoleon's contemplated invasion. The historical setting is worthy of all praise—indeed, as we shall see later, Mr. Hardy shares with Thackeray the power to move as freely in the past as in the