, there s
a suspicion of sensation for its own sake--a suggestion of
savage joy in shocking sensibilities. Of course, the result is
most powerful; but the superior power of the novel is not here
so much as in its splendid sympathy and truth. He has made this
woman's life-history deeply affecting and is right in claiming
that she is a pure soul, judged by intention.

The heart feels that she is sinned against rather than sinning
and in the spectacle of her fall finds food for thought "too
deep for tears." At the same time, it should not be forgotten
that Tess's piteous plight,--the fact that fate has proved too
strong for a soul so high in its capacity for unselfish and
noble love,--is based upon Hardy's assumption that she could not
help it. Here, as elsewhere in his philosophy, you must accept
his premise, or call Tess (whom you may still love) morally
weak. It is this reservation which will lead many to place the
book, as a work of art, and notwithstanding its noble
proportions and compelling power, below such a masterpiece as
"The Return of the Native." That it is on the whole a sane and
wholesome work, however, may be affirmed by one who finds
Hardy's last novel "Jude the Obscure" neither. For there is a
profound difference between two such creations. In the former,
there is a piquant sense of the pathos and the awesomeness of
life, but not of its unrelieved ugliness and disgust; an
impression which is received from the latter. Not only is "Jude"
"a tragedy of unfulfilled aim" as the author calls it; so is
"Tess"; but it fills the reader with a kind of sullen rage to be
an eye-witness of the foul and brutal: he is asked to see a
drama develop beside a pig-sty. It is therefore, intensely
unesthetic which, if true, is a word of condemnation for any
work of art. It is deficient in poetry, in the broad sense;
that, rather than frankness of treatment, is the trouble with
it.

And intellectually, it would seem to be the result of a bad
quarter of an hour of the author: a megrim of the soul. Elements
of greatness it has; a fine motive, too; to display the
impossibilities for evolution on the part of an aspiring soul
hampered by circumstances and weak where most humanity is Weak,
in the exercise of sex-passion. A not dissimilar theme as it is
worked out by Daudet in "Le Petite Chose" is beautiful in its
pathos; in "Jude" there is something shuddering about the
arbitrary piling-up of horror; the modesty of nature is
o