enough to hold his readers. With this point
no doubt many readers stop and are content. But go on, and next after
the story-teller one comes on the philosopher. He is dejected and a
little sinister, and may check your pleasure in his narrative if you
are too attentive to his criticism of it. But a new meaning comes into
the facts as you observe his attitude towards them, and you may be well
content to stop and be fed with thoughts by the philosopher. But if you
go further still you will find, at the very last, the poet, and you need
look for nothing beyond. I am inclined to question if any novelist has
been more truly a poet without ceasing to be in the true sense a
novelist. The poetry of Hardy's novels is a poetry of roots, and it is a
voice of the earth. He seems often to be closer to the earth (which is
at times, as in _The Return of the Native_, the chief person, or the
chorus, of the story) than to men and women, and to see men and women
out of the eyes of wild creatures, and out of the weeds and stones of
the heath. How often, and for how profound a reason, does he not show us
to ourselves, not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continual
observation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes of
birds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and the
deprecating aloofness and inspection of sheep?

1907.

LEON CLADEL

I hope that the life of Leon Cladel by his daughter Judith, which
Lemerre has brought out in a pleasant volume, will do something for the
fame of one of the most original writers of our time. Cladel had the
good fortune to be recognised in his lifetime by those whose approval
mattered most, beginning with Baudelaire, who discovered him before he
had printed his first book, and helped to teach him the craft of
letters. But so exceptional an artist could never be popular, though he
worked in living stuff and put the whole savour of his countryside into
his tragic and passionate stories. A peasant, who writes about peasants
and poor people, with a curiosity of style which not only packs his
vocabulary with difficult words, old or local, and with unheard of
rhythms, chosen to give voice to some never yet articulated emotion, but
which drives him into oddities of printing, of punctuation, of the very
shape of his accents! A page of Cladel has a certain visible
uncouthness, and at first this seems in keeping with his matter; but the
uncouthness, when you look into