from those queer fossils in the Portland Quarries--to
what we see today, so palpable, so real! And yet for all his tragic
pity, Mr. Hardy is a sly and whimsical chronicler. He does not allow
one point of the little jest the gods play on us--the little long-drawn-out
jest--to lose its sting. With something of a goblin-like alertness
he skips here and there, watching those strange scene shifters at their
work. The dual stops of Mr. Hardy's country pipe are cut from the
same reed. With the one he challenges the Immortals on behalf of
humanity; with the other he plays such a shrewd Priapian tune that
all the Satyrs dance.

I sometimes think that only those born and bred in the country can
do justice to this great writer. That dual pipe of his is bewildering to
city people. They over emphasize the "magnanimity" of his art, or
they over emphasize its "miching-mallecho." They do not catch the
secret of that mingled strain. The same type of cultured "foreigner"
is puzzled by Mr. Hardy's self-possession. He ought to commit
himself more completely, or he ought not to have committed himself
at all! There is something that looks to them--so they are tempted to
express it--like the cloven hoof of a most Satyrish cunning, about his
attitude to certain things. That little caustic by-play, for instance,
with which he girds at the established order, never denouncing it
wholesale like Shelley, or accepting it wholesale like Wordsworth--and
always with a tang, a dash of gall and wormwood, an impish malice.

The truth is, there are two spirits in Mr. Hardy, one infinitely
sorrowful and tender, the other whimsical, elfish and malign.

The first spirit rises up in stern Promethean revolt against the
decrees of Fate. The second spirit deliberately allies itself in wanton,
bitter glee, with the humorous provocation of humanity, by the cruel
Powers of the Air. The psychology of all this is not hard to unravel.
The same abnormal sensitiveness that makes him pity the victims of
destiny makes him also not unaware of what may be sweet to the
palate of the gods in such "merry jests." These two tendencies seem
to have grown upon him as years went on and to have become more
and more pronounced. Often, with artists, the reverse thing happens.
Every human being has his own secretive reaction, his own furtive
recoil, from the queer trap we are all in,--his little private method of
retaliation. But many writers are most unscrupulously themselves
when