has insisted frankly, but in the main without offense, on
woman's involvement with sex-passion; he finds that love, in a
Wessex setting, has wider range than has been awarded it in
previous study of sex relations. And he has not hesitated to
depict its rootage in the flesh; not overlooking its rise in the
spirit to noblest heights. And it is this un-Anglo-Saxon-like
comprehension of feminine humanity that makes him so fair to the
sinning woman who trusts to her ruin or proves what is called
weak because of the generous movement of her blood. No one can
despise faithful-hearted Fannie Robin, dragging herself to the
poorhouse along Casterbridge highway; that scene, which bites
itself upon the memory, is fairly bathed in an immense,
understanding pity. Although Hardy has thus used the freedom of
France in treatment, he has, unlike so much of the Gallic
realism, remained an idealist in never denying the soul of love
while speaking more truthfully concerning its body than the
fiction-makers before him. There is no finer handling of sex-love
with due regard to its dual nature,--love that grows in
earth yet flowers until it looks into heaven--than Marty's oft-quoted
beautiful speech at her lover's grave; and Hardy's belief
rings again in the defense of that good fellowship--that
camaraderie--which can grow into "the only love which is as
strong as death--beside which the passion usually so-called by
the name is evanescent as steam." A glimpse like that of Hardy's
mind separates him at once from Maupassant's view of the world.
The traditions of English fiction, which he has insisted on
disturbing, have, after all, been strong to direct his work, as
they have that of all the writers born into the speech and
nourished on its racial ideals.

Another reason for giving the stories of the middle period, such
as "The Return of the Native," preference over those that are
later, lies in the fact that the former have no definite,
aggressive theme; whereas "Tess" announces an intention on the
title page, "Jude," in a foreword. Whatever view of life may be
expressed in "The Mayor of Casterbridge," for example, is
imbedded, as it should be, in the course of the story. This
tendency towards didacticism is a common thing in the cases of
modern writers of fiction; it spoiled a great novelist in the
case of Tolstoy, with compensatory gains in another direction;
of those of English stock, one thinks of Eliot, Howells, Mrs.
Ward and many anot