cterizations of country life and its idyllic flavor. The
novel that trod on its heels, "A Pair of Blue Eyes," maugre its
innocently Delia Cruscan title,--it sounds like a typical effort
of "The Duchess,"--has the tragic end which light-minded readers
have come to dread in this author. He showed his hand thus
comparatively early and henceforth was to have the courage of
his convictions in depicting human fate as he saw it--not as the
reader wished it.

In considering the books that subsequently appeared, to
strengthen Hardy's place with those who know fine fiction, they
are seen to have his genuine hall-mark, just in proportion as
they are Wessex through and through: in the interplay of
character and environment there, we get his deepest expression
as artist and interpreter. The really great novels are "Far From
the Madding Crowd," "The Return of the Native," "The Mayor of
Casterbridge" and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles": when he shifts
the scene to London, as in "The Hand of Ethelberta" or
introduces sophisticated types as in the dull "Laodicean," it
means comparative failure. Mother soil (he is by birth a
Dorchester man and lives there still) gives him idiosyncrasy,
flavor, strength. That the best, most representative work of
Hardy is to be seen in two novels of his middle career, "Far
From the Madding Crowd" and "The Return of the Native" rather
than in the later stories, "Tess" and "Jude," can be
established, I think, purely on the ground of art, without
dragging cheap charges of immorality into the discussion. In the
last analysis, questions of art always become a question of
ethics: the separation is arbitrary and unnatural. That "Tess"
is the book into which the author has most intensely put his
mature belief, may be true: it is quiveringly alive, vital as
only that is which comes from the deeps of a man's being. But
Hardy is so much a special pleader for Tess, that the argument
suffers and a grave fault is apparent when the story's climax is
studied. There is an intrusion of what seems like factitious
melodrama instead of that tissue of events which one expects
from a stern necessitarian. Tess need not be a murderess;
therefore, the work should not so conclude, for this is an
author whose merit is that his effects of character are causal.
He is fatalistic, yes; but in general he royally disdains the
cheap tricks of plot whereby excitement is furnished at the
expense of credulity and verisimilitude. In Tess's end