tion have
always had a special topographical appeal to me. I greatly enjoy the
work of a writer who has set himself to treat a given countryside
exhaustively. This, more even than his masterly irony, his philosophy,
his remarkable fullness of mind and opulent allusiveness, has been at
the root of the immense appeal Hardy's work makes to me. ('Q,' in a
different measure, of course, makes a similar appeal.) Let the Wessex
master forsake his countryside, or leave his peasants for gentlefolk,
and immediately my interest wanes, his wonderful appeal fails.

Since I have been here in the bush I have understood, as never before,
the great and far-reaching popularity of Thomas Hardy's work among
Americans. He gives so much which not all the wealth, nor all the
genius of that inventive race, can possibly evolve out of their New
World. But, upon the whole, I ought not to have brought my fine, tall
rank of Hardy's here, still less to have pored over them as I have.
There is that second edition of _Far From the Madding Crowd_ now, with
its delicious woodcuts by H. Paterson. It is dated 1874--I was a boy
then, newly arrived in this antipodean land--and the frontispiece
shows Gabriel Oak soliciting Bathsheba: 'Do you happen to want a
shepherd, ma'am?' No, I cannot say my readings of Hardy have been good
for me here. There is _Jude the Obscure_ now, a masterpiece of
heart-bowing tragedy that. And, especially insidious in my case, there
are passages like this from that other tragedy in the idyllic vein,
_The Woodlanders_:

_Winter in a solitary house in the country, without society, is
tolerable, nay, even enjoyable and delightful, given certain
conditions; but these are not the conditions which attach to the life
of a professional man who drops down into such a place by mere
accident.... They are old association--an almost exhaustive
biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate and
inanimate, within the observer's horizon. He must know all about those
invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the
fields which look so grey from his windows; recall whose creaking
plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands planted
the trees that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose horses and
hounds have torn through that underwood; what birds affect that
particular brake; what bygone domestic dramas of love, jealousy,
revenge, or disappointment have been enacted in the cottages, the
mansio