er tries to visualize any scene out
of the Wessex Novels will be forced to see the figures of the persons
concerned "silhouetted" against a formidable skyline. One sees them,
these poor impassioned ones, moving in tragic procession along the
edge of the world, and, when the procession is over, darkness
re-establishes itself. The quality that makes Mr. Hardy's manner such a
refuge from the levities and gravities of the "reforming writers" is a
quality that springs from the soil. The soil has a gift of "proportion"
like nothing else. Things fall into due perspective on Egdon Heath,
and among the water-meadows of Blackmoor life is felt as the tribes
of men have felt it since the beginning.

The modern tendency is to mock at sexual passion and grow grave
over social and artistic problems. Mr. Hardy eliminates social and
artistic problems and "takes nothing seriously"--not even
"God"--except the love and the hate of men and women, and the natural
elements that are their accomplices. It is for this lack in them, this
uneasy levity over the one thing that really counts, that it is so hard
to read many humorous and arresting modern writers, except in
railway trains and cafes. They have thought it clever to dispossess
the passion of our poor heart of its essential poetry. They have not
understood that man would sooner suffer the bitterness of death than
be deprived of his _right_ to suffer the bitterness of love.

It must be, I suppose, that these flippant triflers are so optimistic
about their reforms and their ethical ideals and their sanitary projects
that to them such things as how the sun rises over Shaston and sinks
over Budmouth; such things as what Eustacia felt when she walked,
"talking to herself," across the blasted heath; such things as the
mood of Henchard when he cursed the day of his birth, are mere
accidents and irrelevancies, by no means germane to the matter.

Well, perhaps they are wise to be so hopeful. But for the rest of us,
for whom the world does not seem likely to "improve" so fast, it is
an unspeakable relief that there should be at least one writer left
interested in the things that interested Sophocles and Shakespeare,
and possessed of a style that does not, remembering the work of
such hands, put our generation altogether to shame.

WALTER PATER

What are the qualities that make this shy and furtive Recluse, this
Wanderer in the shadow, the greatest of critics? Imagination, in the
first pla