e peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic
life than the pachydermatous king.' But he requires a certain amount of
emotion to shake off the lethargy natural to his style, and when he has
merely a dull fact to mention he says it like this: 'He reclined on his
couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light.' In the next
sentence, where he is interested in expressing the impalpable emotion
of the situation, we get this faultless and uncommon use of words: 'The
night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent;
the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now
digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the happiness of a
thousand other people with as little disturbance or change of mien.'

No one has ever studied so scrupulously as Hardy the effect of emotion
on inanimate things, or has ever seen emotion so visually in people. For
instance: 'Terror was upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was
flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole.'
But so intense is his preoccupation with these visual effects that he
sometimes cannot resist noting a minute appearance, though in the very
moment of assuring us that the person looking on did not see it. 'She
hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so
large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like
the object lens of a microscope.' And it is this power of seeing to
excess, and being limited to sight which is often strangely revealing,
that leaves him at times helpless before the naked words that a
situation supremely seen demands for its completion. The one failure in
what is perhaps his masterpiece, _The Return of the Native_, is in the
words put into the mouth of Eustacia and Yeobright in the perfectly
imagined scene before the mirror, a scene which should be the
culminating scene of the book; and it is, all but the words: the words
are crackle and tinsel.

What is it, then, that makes up the main part of the value and
fascination of Hardy, and how is it that what at first seem, and may
well be, defects, uncouthnesses, bits of formal preaching, grotesque
ironies of event and idea, come at last to seem either good in
themselves or good where they are, a part of the man if not of the
artist? One begins by reading for the story, and the story is of an
attaching interest. Here is a story-teller of the good old kind, a
story-teller whose plot is