minating consciousness of the tragic complexity of quite little
and unimportant characters. To a real lover of Henry James the greyest
and least promising aspects of ordinary life seem to hold up to us
infinite possibilities of delicate excitement. It is indeed out of
excitement--partly intellectual and partly aesthetic,--that his great
effects are produced. And yet the final effect is always one of
resignation and calm--as with all the supreme masters.

70. THOMAS HARDY. TESS OF THE D'URBEVILLES. THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE.
THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE. FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. WESSEX POEMS.

Thomas Hardy remains the greatest poet and novelist of the England of
our age. His poetry, Wessex Poems, Poems of Past and Present, Time's
Laughing-Stock, Satires of Circumstance, make up the most powerful and
original contribution to modern verse, produced recently, either in
England or America. Not to value Hardy's poetry as highly as all but
his very greatest prose is to betray oneself as having missed the full
pregnancy of his bitter and lovely wisdom.

He has, like Henry James, three "manners" or styles--the first
containing such lighter, friendlier work, as "Life's Little Ironies,"
"Under a Greenwood Tree," and "The Trumpet Major"--the second being
the period of the great tragedies which assume the place, in his work,
of "Hamlet," "Lear," "Macbeth" and "Othello," in the work of
Shakespeare--the third, of curious and imaginative interest, expresses
in quite a particular way, Mr. Hardy's own peculiar point of view. The
Well-Beloved, Jude the Obscure, and the later poems would belong to
this epoch.

At his best Hardy is a novelist second to none. His style has a
grandeur, a distinction, a concentration, which we find neither in
Balzac nor Dostoievsky. Not to appreciate the power and beauty of his
manner, when his real inspiration holds him, is to confess that the
genuinely classical in style and the genuinely pagan in feeling has no
meaning for you. No English writer, whether in prose or poetry, has
ever caught so completely the magic of the earth and the quaint
humors, tragical and laughable, of those who live inured to her moods;
who live with her moroseness, her whimsicality, her vindictiveness,
her austerity, her evasive grace.

Mr. Hardy's clairvoyant feeling for Nature is, however, only the
background of his work. He is no idyllic posture-monger. The march of
events as they drive forward the primitive earth-born me