thought in the last-named book will
not out of our ears: Fate had played its last little jest with
poor Tess.

But there are mitigations, many and welcome. Hardy has the most
delightful humor. His peasants and simple middle-class folk are
as distinctive and enjoyable as anything since Shakspere. He
also has a more sophisticated, cutting humor--tipped with irony
and tart to the taste--which he uses in those stories or scenes
where urbanites mingle with his country folk. But his humorous
triumphs are bucolic. And for another source of keenest
pleasure, there is his style, ennobling all his work. Whether
for the plastic manipulation of dialogue or the eloquencies and
exactitudes of description, he is emphatically a master. His
mind, pagan in its bent, is splendidly broad in its
comprehension of the arcana of Nature and that of a poet
sensitive to all the witchery of a world which at core is
inscrutably dark and mysterious. He knows, none better, of the
comfort to be got even from the sad when its beauty is made
palpitating. No one before him, not Meredith himself, has so
interfused Nature with man as to bring out the thought of man's
ancient origin in the earth, his birth-ties, and her claims on
his allegiance. This gives a rare savor to his handling of what
with most novelists is often mere background. Egdon Heath was
mentioned; the setting in "The Return of the Native" is not
background in the usual sense; that mighty stretch of moorland
is almost like the central actor of the drama, so potent is its
influence upon the fate of the other characters. So with "The
Woodlanders" and still other stories. Take away this subtle and
vital relation of man to Nature, and the whole organism
collapses. Environment with Hardy is atmosphere, influence,
often fate itself. Being a scientist in the cast of his
intellect, although by temperament a poet, he believes in
environment as the shaping power conceived of by Taine and Zola.
It is this use of Nature as a power upon people of deep, strong,
simple character, showing the sweep of forces far more potent
than the conventions of the polite world, which distinguishes
Hardy's fiction. Fate with him being so largely that impersonal
thing, environment; allied with temperament (for which he is not
responsible), and with opportunity--another element of luck--it
follows logically that man is the sport of the gods. Hardy is
unable, like other determinists, to escape the dilemma of free-will