to be finished. And like Meredith, he is a man of
genius and, strictly speaking, a finer artist than the elder
author. For quality, then, and significance of accomplishment,
Hardy may well be examined with the masters whose record is
rounded out by death. He offers a fine example of the logic of
modern realism, as it has been applied by a first-class mind to
the art of fiction. In Meredith, on the contrary, is shown a
sort of synthesis of the realistic and poetic-philosophic
interpretation. Hardy is for this reason easier to understand
and explain; Meredith refuses classification.

The elements of strength in Thomas Hardy can be made out
clearly; they are not elusive. Wisely, he has chosen to do a
very definite thing and, with rare perseverance and skill, he
has done it. He selected as setting the south-western part of
England--Wessex, is the ancient name he gave it--that embraces
Somersetshire and contiguous counties, because he felt that the
types of humanity and the view of life he wished to show could
best be thrown out against the primitive background. Certain
elemental truths about men and women, he believed, lost sight of
in the kaleidoscopic attritions of the town, might there be
clearly seen. The choice of locale was thus part of an attitude
toward life. That attitude or view may be described fairly well
as one of philosophic fatalism.

It has not the cold removedness of the stoic: it has pity in it,
even love. But it is deeply sad, sometimes bitter. In Hardy's
presentation of Nature (a remark applying to some extent to a
younger novelist who shows his influence, Phillpotts), she is
displayed as an ironic expression, with even malignant moods, of
a supreme cosmic indifference to the petty fate of that
animalcule, man. And this, in spite of a curious power she
possesses of consoling him and of charming him by blandishments
that cheat the loneliness of his soul. There is no purer example
of tragedy in modern literature than Mr. Hardy's strongest, most
mature stories. A mind deeply serious and honest, interprets the
human case in this wise and conceives that the underlying
pitilessness can most graphically be conveyed in a setting like
that of Egdon Heath, where the great silent forces of Nature
somberly interblend with the forces set in motion by the human
will, both futile to produce happiness. Even the attempt to be
virtuous fails in "Jude": as the attempt to be happy does in
"Tess." That sardonic, final