an. This
bewildered animal--wrestling in darkness with he knows not what.

And gazing long and long into this mirror, the poignancy of what we
behold is strangely softened. After all, it is something, whatever
becomes of us, to have been conscious of all this. It is something to
have outwatched Arcturus, and felt "the sweet influences" of the
Pleiades. Congruous with such a mood is the manner in which,
while Mr. Hardy opposes himself to Christianity, he cannot forget it.
He cannot "cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff which
weighs upon the heart." It troubles and vexes him. It haunts him.
And his work both gains and suffers. He flings gibe after gibe at
"God," but across his anger falls the shadow of the Cross. How
should it not be so? "All may be permitted," but one must not add a
feather's weight to the wheel that breaks our "little ones."

It is this that separates Mr. Hardy's work from so much modern
fiction that is clever and "philosophical" but does not satisfy one's
imagination. All things with Mr. Hardy--even the facts of geology
and chemistry--are treated with that imaginative clairvoyance that
gives them their place in the human comedy. And is not Christianity
itself one of these facts? How amazing that such a thing should have
appeared at all upon the earth! When one reads Meredith, with his
brilliant intellectual cleverness, one finds Christianity "taken for
granted," and dismissed as hardly relevant to modern topics.

But Mr. Hardy is too pagan, in the true sense, too fascinated by the
poetry of life and the essential ritual of life, to dismiss any great
religion in this way. The thing is always with him, just as the Gothic
Tower of St. Peter's Church in Casterbridge is always with him. He
may burst into impish fury with its doctrines, but, like one of those
queer demons who peep out from such consecrated places, yet never
leave them, his imagination requires that atmosphere. For the same
reason, in spite of his intellectual realization of the mechanical
processes of Fate, their engine-like dumbness and blindness, he is
always being driven to _personify_ these ultimate powers; to
personify them, or _it,_ as something that takes infernal satisfaction
in fooling its luckless creations; in provoking them and scourging
them to madness.

Mr. Hardy's ultimate thought is that the universe is blind and
unconscious; that it knows not what it does. But, standing among the
graves of those Wessex churc