or not (and it does not explain the faultiness of
such pictures as Carker and his kind) there can be no doubt that this
trick in Dickens of beginning with a salient impression and working
outward to a fuller conception of character is part at least of the
reason of his enormous hold upon his readers. No man leads you into the
mazes of his invention so easily and with such a persuasive hand.

The great novelists who were writing contemporarily with him--the
Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot--it is impossible to deal with
here, except to say that the last is indisputably, because of her
inability to fuse completely art and ethics, inferior to Mrs. Gaskell or
to either of the Bronte sisters. Nor of the later Victorians who added
fresh variety to the national style can the greatest, Meredith, be more
than mentioned for the exquisiteness of his comic spirit and the brave
gallery of English men and women he has given us in what is, perhaps,
fundamentally the most English thing in fiction since Fielding wrote.
For our purpose Mr. Hardy, though he is a less brilliant artist, is more
to the point. His novels brought into England the contemporary pessimism
of Schopenhaur and the Russians, and found a home for it among the
English peasantry. Convinced that in the upper classes character could
be studied and portrayed only subjectively because of the artificiality
of a society which prevented its outlet in action, he turned to the
peasantry because with them conduct is the direct expression of the
inner life. Character could be shown working, therefore, not
subjectively but in the act, if you chose a peasant subject. His
philosophy, expressed in this medium, is sombre. In his novels you can
trace a gradual realization of the defects of natural laws and the
quandary men are put to by their operation. Chance, an irritating and
trifling series of coincidences, plays the part of fate. Nature seems to
enter with the hopelessness of man's mood. Finally the novelist turns
against life itself. "Birth," he says, speaking of Tess, "seemed to her
an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion whose gratuitousness nothing
in the result seemed to justify and at best could only palliate." It is
strange to find pessimism in a romantic setting; strange, too, to find a
paganism which is so little capable of light or joy.

(4)

The characteristic form of English fiction, that in which the requisite
illusion of the complexity and variety of life is