completeness which destroys all thought of self. She enjoys no
measure of reward while Winterbourne lives. He never knows of Marty's
love. But in that last fine paragraph of this remarkable book, when
the poor girl places the flowers upon his grave she utters a little
lament which for beauty, pathos, and realistic simplicity is without
parallel in modern fiction. Hardy was never more of an artist than
when writing the last chapter of _The Woodlanders_.

After all, a book in which unselfish love is described in terms at
once just and noble cannot be dangerously pessimistic, even if it also
takes cognizance of such hopeless cases as a man with a chronic
tendency to fluctuations of the heart.

The matter may be put briefly thus: In Hardy's novels one sees the
artistic result of an effort to paint life as it is, with much of its
joy and a deal of its sorrow, with its good people and its selfish
people, its positive characters and its Laodiceans, its men and women
who dominate circumstances, and its unhappy ones who are submerged.
These books are the record of what a clear-eyed, sane, vigorous,
sympathetic, humorous man knows about life; a man too conscious of
things as they are to wish grossly to exaggerate or to disguise them;
and at the same time so entirely aware how much poetry as well as
irony God has mingled in the order of the world as to be incapable of
concealing that fact either. He is of such ample intellectual frame
that he makes the petty contentions of literary schools appear
foolish. I find a measure of Hardy's mind in passages which set forth
his conception of the preciousness of life, no matter what the form in
which life expresses itself. He is peculiarly tender toward brute
creation. In that paragraph which describes Tess discovering the
wounded pheasants in the wood, Hardy suggests the thought, quite new
to many people, that chivalry is not confined to the relations of man
to man or of man to woman. There are still weaker fellow-creatures in
Nature's teeming family. What if we are unmannerly or unchivalrous
toward them?

He abounds in all manner of pithy sayings, many of them wise, a few of
them profound, and not one which is unworthy a second reading. It is
to be hoped that he will escape the doubtful honor of being
dispersedly set forth in a 'Wit and Wisdom of Thomas Hardy.' Such
books are a depressing species of literature and seem chiefly designed
to be given away at holiday time to acquaintances