hyards, or watching the twisted threads
of perverse destiny that plague those hapless hearts under a thousand
village roofs, it is impossible for him not to long to "strike back" at
this damned System of Things that alone is responsible. And how
can one "strike back" unless one converts unconscious machinery
into a wanton Providence? Where Mr. Hardy is so incomparably
greater than Meredith and all his modern followers is that in these
Wessex novels there is none of that intolerable "ethical discussion"
which obscures "the old essential candours" of the human situation.

The reaction of men and women upon one another, in the presence
of the solemn and the mocking elements; this will outlast all social
readjustments and all ethical reforms.

While the sun shines and the moon draws the tides, men and women
will ache from jealousy, and the lover will not be the beloved! Long
after a quite new set of "interesting modern ideas" have replaced the
present, children will break the hearts of their parents, and parents
will break the hearts of their children. Mr. Hardy is indignant
enough over the ridiculous conventions of Society, but he knows
that, at the bottom, what we suffer from is "the dust out of which we
are made;" the eternal illusion and disillusion which must drive us
on and "take us off" until the planet's last hour.

Mr. Hardy's style, at its best, has an imaginative suggestiveness
which approaches, though it may not quite reach, the indescribable
touch of the Shakespearean tragedies. There is also a quality in it
peculiar to himself--threatening and silencing; a thunderous
suppression, a formidable reserve, an iron tenacity. Sometimes,
again, one is reminded of the ancient Roman poets, and not
unfrequently, too, of the rhythmic incantations of Sir Thomas
Browne, that majestic and perverted Latinist.

The description, for instance, of Egdon Heath, at the beginning of
the Return of the Native, has a dusky architectural grandeur that is
like the Portico of an Egyptian Temple. The same thing may be
noted of that sudden apparition of Stonehenge, as Tess and Angel
stumble upon it in their flight through the darkness.

One thinks of the words of William Blake: "He who does not love
Form more than Colour is a coward." For it is, above all, Form that
appeals to Mr. Hardy. The iron plough of his implacable style drives
pitilessly through the soft flesh of the earth until it reaches the
architectural sub-structure. Whoev