ace, one of the few limitations to Mr. Hardy's
great charm as a writer lies in his tendency to encumber his page with
detail. At a supremely romantic moment one of his people sits down to
contemplate a tribe of ants, and watches them through two whole printed
pages. In another case a man in imminent deadly peril surveys through
two pages the history of the geologic changes which have befallen our
planet. Each passage, taken by itself, is good enough. Taken where it
is, each is terribly wearisome and wrong.

I do not know that any critic has yet recorded Mr. Hardy's singular
limitations as to the invention of plot. Speaking from memory, I cannot
at this moment recall a novel of his in which some trouble does not
circle about a marriage licence, and I can recall many instances of
going to church to get married and coming back single. That, indeed, is
Mr. Hardy's _piece de resistance_ in the way of invention, and it crops
up in one book after another with a helpless inevitable-ness which at
last grows comic.

But here we can afford to have done with carping, and can turn to the
much more grateful task of praise. I do not think it too much to say
that Mr. Hardy has studied his own especial part of England, has made
himself master of its landscape, its town and hamlet life, its tradition
and sentiment, and general spiritual atmosphere, to such triumphant
effect as to set himself wholly apart from all other English writers
of fiction. His devotion to his own beloved Wessex has brought him
this rich and merited reward--that he is the recognised first and final
master of its field. His knowledge of rustic life within his own borders
is beautifully sympathetic and profound. His impression of the landscape
in the midst of which this life displays itself is broad and noble and
alive. His literary style is a thing to admire, to study, and to admire
again. All worthy readers of English fiction are his debtors for many
idyllic happy hours, and many deep inspirations of wholesome English
air. And if, at the parting of the ways, we wave a decisive farewell to
him, we are not unmindful of the time when he was the best and dearest
of our comrades, and we leave him in the certainty that, whatever path
he has chosen, he has been guided in his choice by an ambition which is
entirely honourable and sincere.

VII.--UNDER FRENCH ENCOURAGEMENT--GEORGE MOORE

That salt of sincerity which saves 'Jude the Obscure' and 'Tess o' the
D'Urbe