y is not the best way. 'Where,' he asks, 'are the amusing books from
voracious students and habitual writers?'

This startling arraignment of authors has been made by other men than
Walter Bagehot. Hazlitt in his essay on the 'Ignorance of the Learned'
teaches much the same doctrine. Its general truth is indisputable,
though Bagehot himself makes exception in favor of Sir Walter Scott.
But the two famous critics are united in their conviction that learned
people are generally dull, and that books which are the work of
habitual writers are not amusing.

There are as a matter of course more exceptions than one. Thomas Hardy
is a distinguished exception. Thomas Hardy is an 'habitual writer,'
but he is always amusing. The following paragraphs are intended to
emphasize certain causes of this quality in his work, the quality by
virtue of which he chains the attention and proves himself the most
readable novelist now living. That he does attract and hold is clear
to any one who has tried no more than a half-dozen pages from one of
his best stories. He has the fatal habit of being interesting,--fatal
because it robs you who read him of time which you might else have
devoted to 'improving' literature, such as history, political economy,
or light science. He destroys your peace of mind by compelling your
sympathies in behalf of people who never existed. He undermines your
will power and makes you his slave. You declare that you will read but
one more chapter and you weakly consent to make it two chapters. As a
special indulgence you spoil a working day in order to learn about the
_Return of the Native_, perhaps agreeing with a supposititious 'better
self' that you will waste no more time on novels for the next six
months. But you are of ascetic fibre indeed if you do not follow up
the book with a reading of _The Woodlanders_ and _The Mayor of
Casterbridge_.

There is a reason for this. If the practiced writer often fails to
make a good book because he knows nothing, Mr. Hardy must succeed in
large part because he knows so much. The more one reads him the more
is one impressed with the extent of his knowledge. He has an intimate
acquaintance with an immense number of interesting things.

He knows men and women--if not all sorts and all conditions, at least
a great many varieties of the human animal. Moreover, his men are men
and his women are women. He does not use them as figures to accentuate
a landscape, or as ventriloquist