"Life in London is a life for lunatics. And life in England generally is
a glorious life for clergymen and counter-hoppers, but it's not the life
for a man. It was all very well in the last century, you know, when
Englishmen were men first, and lunatics, if they chose, or clergymen or
counter-hoppers, afterwards. Ah! if that wasn't exactly our golden age,
it was the age of our maturity, of our manhood. If you doubt it, read
the literature of the eighteenth century. Take Fielding--no, don't take
Fielding. Anyhow, since then we have added nothing to the fabric of
life. To pile it on above, we've simply been digging away like mad from
below, and at last our top-heavy civilisation is nodding to its fall;
and its fall will sweep us all back into barbarism again. Then, when we
are forced back into natural conditions, the new race will be born. No
more of your big-headed, spindle-shanked manikins: we shall have a
chance then of seeing a _man_--that is, a perfect animal. You may turn
up your nose, my superfine lady: let me tell you that this glorious
animalism means sanity, and sanity means strength, and strength means
virtue. _Vis--vir--virtus_, ma'am."

Hardy sat up and caressed the calves of his legs with thoughtful
emotion, as if he recognised them as the sources of the moral law within
him. His cousin had not followed his precipitate logic. With woman's
well-known aversion from the abstract, she was concentrating her
attention on the concrete case, the glorious animal before her. Now it
would be very wrong to suppose that Hardy was in the least tainted with
socialism, anarchism, or any such pestilent heresies, or that he had
read "Emile" and "Walden." He had never heard of either of these works,
and had no desire whatever for the restoration of society on a primitive
basis of animalism, modified by light literature, clothing, and the
moral law. For all modern theories he had a withering contempt, his own
simple creed being that in the beginning God made man a Tory squire. His
quarrel with the social order was a purely private and particular one.
In our modern mythology, Custom, Circumstance, and Heredity are the
three Fates that weave the web of human life. Hardy did not wholly
sympathise with this belief. He had too profound a respect for his own
pedigree to lay his sins at his great-grandfather's door. As the nephew
of a Tory squire, he was but two degrees removed from original
righteousness. In spite of this considerat