versus predestination, and that other crux, the imputation
of personality to the workings of so-called natural laws. Indeed
curiously, in his gigantic poem-cycle, "the Dynasts," the
culmination of his life-work, he seems to hint at a plan of the
universe which may be beneficial.

To name another quality that gives distinction to Hardy's work:
his fiction is notably well-built, and he is a resourceful
technician. Often, the way he seizes a plot and gives it
proportionate progress to an end that is inevitable, exhibits a
well-nigh perfect art. Hardy's novels, for architectural
excellence, are really wonderful and will richly repay careful
study in this respect. It has been suggested that because his
original profession was that of an architect, his constructive
ability may have been carried over to another craft. This may be
fantastic; but the fact remains that for the handling of
material in such a manner as to eliminate the unnecessary, and
move steadily toward the climax, while ever imitating though not
reproducing, the unartificial gait of life, Hardy has no
superior in English fiction and very few beyond it. These
ameliorations of humor and pity, these virtues of style and
architectural handling make the reading of Thomas Hardy a
literary experience, and very far from an undiluted course in
Pessimism. A sane, vigorous, masculine mind is at work in all
his fiction up to its very latest. Yet it were idle to deny the
main trend of his teaching. It will be well to trace with some
care the change which has crept gradually over his view of the
world. As his development of thought is studied in the
successive novels he produced between 1871 and 1898, it may
appear that there is little fundamental change in outlook: the
tragic note, and the dark theory of existence, explicit in
"Tess" and "Jude," is more or less implicit in "Desperate
Remedies." But change there is, to be found in the deepening of
the feeling, the pushing of a theory to its logical extreme.
This opening tale, read in the light of what he was to do,
strikes one as un-Hardy-like in its rather complex plot, with
its melodramatic tinge of incident.

The second book, "Under the Greenwood Tree," is a blithe, bright
woodland comedy and it would have been convenient for a cut-and-dried
theory of Hardy's growth from lightness to gravity, had it
come first. It is, rather, a happy interlude, hardly
representative of his main interest, save for its clear-cut
chara