"Under the Greenwood Tree." This was well received, and deservedly so; another twelvemonth, therefore, saw a third novel, on different lines from its predecessor, but also successful, "A Pair of Blue Eyes." But a sure instinct led Mr. Hardy away from the conventional society novel back to his peasants of Dorset, or as he prefers to call it, “Wessex,” and in "Far from the Madding Crowd" (1874) he achieved a gratifying success. The story appeared first as a serial in The Cornhill Magazine, and until the appearance of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," only a year ago, was regarded as its author's masterpiece, judicious critics declaring that in its pages the English peasant had been made to speak out as he had never done since the days of Shakspere. Since this success Mr. Hardy's pen has rarely rested, and his fame has been steadily growing. Besides dramatising "Far from the Madding Crowd" (1879), he has written eight novels, one novelette, and two volumes of short stories, many of which have appeared simultaneously in England, America, Australia, and India, while some have been translated into foreign languages. His latest novel, "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," has been more widely read and noticed than any work of fiction in recent years, except, perhaps, Mrs. Ward's "David Grieve" and the stories of Mr. Kipling. He is now said to be engaged upon a novel entitled "The Pursuit of the Well Beloved."

Little is known about Mr. Hardy's personality. His portrait shows us a strongly individual face, which is attractive if not handsome. The lines of deep thought are plainly visible, and there is a far-away look in the eyes that recalls the novelist's early poetry, and his affiliation to some extent with the romantic school. Naturally preferring to live in his favorite "Wessex," Mr. Hardy resides near Dorchester in a fine house of his own design. He loves the quiet of family life (he married a Miss Gifford in 1875), so he rarely visits London except on business, and is not often pestered by the lion hunter and the reporter. Still we feel that he is no hermit, that he must have known personally the characters that move across

his pages. We feel also that he is not a mere bookworm, but that he knows every foot of ground in Devon, Dorset, Summerset, Hampshire, and Wilts, in that Wessex whose literature begins with England's noblest king and ends with -Mr. Hardy. It is time, however, as our author uses "I” with the greatest infrequency in his writings, to pass to a consideration of his novels in detail, and of his general characteristics as a writer of fiction.

A man of letters is himself often a good critic of his own youthful work, and so Mr. Hardy fairly sums up the defects of "Desperate Remedies," when he says of it in the "Prefatory Note" appended to its re-issue in 1889: "The principles observed in its composition are, no doubt, too exclusively those in which mystery, entanglement, surprise, and moral obliquity are depended on for exciting interest." In other words, Mr. Hardy means to say that he had fallen under the spell of that wonderful weaver of plots, Wilkie Collins. But Collins in his best work avoided the mistake into which his follower fell, of failing to observe a due proportion between the mystery and entanglement of his plot and the value, that is the interest, of his characters and their actions. We do not like to be perplexed or mystified about people unless we are greatly interested in them, and with the possible exception of the steward Manston, there are no very interesting characters in "Desperate Remedies."

The plot is too intricate to be given here in detail. There are marriages that are no marriages, there is a murder, there is an illegitimate son of an aristocratic mother, there is a beautiful love-sick heroine who gets into every sort of trouble, and a love-sick hero who plays detective and gets her out. In short, we have all the materials for a story eminently suitable for the New York Ledger, materials put together in a very artificial way, but in a way that excites and interests the reader to his heart's content. But the question immediately occurs, if a man of thirty-one could seriously occupy himself in developing such a plot, how was it that he ever succeeded in writing a great novel? An an

swer is easily found. An ultra-sensational novel with a mixed-up plot and an artificial method of presentation does not necessarily mean an unpromising volume. When such a novel is written in a style which is at once recognized as individual in its simplicity, its strength, its grace; when it is found to be distinguished by passages and scenes of rare descriptive power; when its author, time and again dazzles us with a flashing simile or an exquisitely poetic epithet; when he not infrequently lets drop a pearl of wisdom which no swine save skimming readers can possibly be found to spurn; when to crown all he takes an impassive peasant and makes him talk as though nobody were near to overhear him; then we may well feel sure that our novice in authorship gropes only because he is seeking for a method and that he is not unlikely to find one.

That all the above promising traits were to be found in "Desperate Remedies" by a careful reader of 1871 will not, we think, be disputed by the careful reader of 1892. Of course such a proposition cannot be definitely established in an article like the present, but the book is easily accessible, and the accuracy of our statement can be tested. We feel inclined, however, to support ourselves by at least one quotation :

"His clothes are something exterior to every man; but to a woman her dress is part of her body. Its motions are all present to her intelligence if not to her eyes; no man knows how his coat-tails swing. By the slightest hyperbole it may be said that her dress has sensation. Crease but the very Ultima Thule of fringe or flounce, and it hurts her as much as pinching her. Delicate antennæ, or feelers bristle on every outlying frill. Go to the uppermost: she is there; tread on the lowest: the fair creature is there almost before you."

"Under the Greenwood Tree" is a year-long rural idyl, as simple in its plot as "Desperate Remedies" is complex. The nine chapters of the first part entitled "Winter," are taken up with a wonderfully humorous description of the oldfashioned wind-instrument choir of the parish of Mellstock trudging around on Christmas night to serenade every dweller in the parish, and with an equally humorous description of

the party given by honest Reuben Dewey, the tranter, or wagoner. The other parts, named after the other seasons, commemorate the love of Dick Dewey, the tranter's son for Fancy Day, the village schoolmistress-a love which ends in the most typical of rural weddings, in spite of the fact that the young rector himself is somewhat smitten with the fair schoolmistress who plays the first organ set up in the parish church. The despair of the old choir at the advent of this organ and their visit to the rector in expostulation are described with a humor that puts Mr. Hardy alongside of Dickens if not, as some think, above him. Obviously no quotation can do justice to the exquisite truth to nature, to the simplicity, the humor, the genial charm of this idyl which is as much above most genre sketches of the modern school as a representative poem of Wordsworth's is above the best effusion of Bryant. The fresh smell of woods and fields blows through the all but poetic pages; like Antæus the reader rises up refreshed from a touch of mother earth. Mr. Hardy has at last learned his method. He reproduces nature, whether in flower, or tree, or cloud, or field, or mannot the man of streets and parlors—but the man of the fields, who is as much a natural object as a tree or a boulder—yet his method of reproduction is not that of the photographer, but of the painter. He is realistic, but at the same time idealistic; in other words, he is an artist, and the sub-title of his book, "A Rural Painting of the Dutch School," does not belie its qualities.

We said above that Mr. Hardy is as humorous as Dickens, and we appealed to the description of the choir's visit to the rectory in proof of the assertion. As this scene takes up a whole chapter, it must remain unquoted, but who could fail to quote a few paragraphs from the chapter describing Dick Dewey's first visit to the house of his sweetheart's father, Geoffrey Day, in the depths of Yalbury wood? Geoffrey and Dick and Fancy, the sweet link between them, are seated at the noon-day meal. Mrs. Day the second is bustling about overhead preparing to make a disagreeable descent

upon the party below. The conversation meanwhile has turned on matrimony.

"If we are doomed to marry, we marry; if we are doomed to remain single, we do;' replied Dick.

"Geoffrey had by this time sat down again, and he now made his lips thin by severely straining them across his gums, and looked out of the fireplace window to the end of the paddock with solemn scrutiny. That's not the case with some folk,' he said at length, as if he read the words on a board at the farther end of the paddock.

"Fancy looked interested, and Dick said 'No?'

"There's that wife o' mine. It was her doom not to be nobody's wife at all in the wide universe. But she made up her mind that she would, and did it twice over. Doom? Doom is nothing beside an elderly womanquite a chiel in her hands."

"A Pair of Blue Eyes," Mr. Hardy's third novel, gives the heart history of a rather susceptible but very charming young lady, Miss Elfride Swancourt, who, by the way, is said to be unpopular with her own sex. It has at least one strong character, Henry Knight, the reviewer, Elfride's second lover. It contains also one very powerful scene, the rescue of Knight from the cliff through the heroism and presence of mind of Elfride. It is not only an interesting story, but a very subtle study of feminine instincts, yet although a successful novel as a whole, it can hardly be placed among our author's masterpieces. The last scene of all in which Elfride's two disappointed lovers encounter her husband at her tomb, is pathetic in the extreme.

"Far from the Madding Crowd" has already been described as inferior only to "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." It combines all the charm of "Under the Greenwood Tree" with more than the power and interest of "Desperate Remedies." It is the first work to prove that Mr. Hardy possesses the power of creating characters that live. Farmer Oak, the faithful, modest, sensible hero, is a character that no one can forget, a nobler, a longer lived character, perhaps, than even Adam Bede. Joseph Poorgrass, Mr. Hardy's masterpiece in the way of peasant characters, is a personage whom Fielding would not have disdained to create-Fielding who in the creation of characters is the Zeus of English