in a vivid passage, "announced old Rome in every street, alley, and precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed dead men of Rome. It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town fields or gardens without coming upon some tall soldier or other of the Empire who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest for a space of fifteen hundred years." And the memories of ancient Rome are not the only memories evoked by ancient Wessex. The country has its associations no less lively than those of the town. If a man should live with peace and understanding in a remote village, "he must know," says Mr. Hardy, "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 hands 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 mansion, the street, or on the green." That, and much more, have the villages of Wessex meant to Mr. Hardy. He sees the houses scarred with the pathos of life, like the faces of the men and women, and from an inanimate present divines an animate past. He peoples the cottages with human beings of bygone days, the puppets of the ministers of an untoward fate, and he speaks to them or hears them speak with the familiarity of a complacent neighbor.

And as the men of the past keep no secrets from him, so he has learned the language of the trees and of the winds. In the opening lines of "Under the Greenwood Tree," the first of its series, he strikes the true note of melLIVING AGE VOL. LIX. 3127

ody, which echoes through all his books. To dwellers in a wood," he tells us, "almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quaverings; the beech rustles as its flat boughs rise and fall." Here is lore which will always elude the town-bred man, and this lore, intimately acquired by Mr. Hardy, explains the profound emotions which he perceives in hill and vale, in the placid river or the tumbling sea. He looks upon landscape as the proper background of comedy or tragedy. The countryside is the web upon which he weaves the intricate woof of his stories. "Fair prospects wed happily with fair times," says he; "but, alas! if times be not fair." So vividly conscious is he himself, so vividly conscious does he make his readers, of certain scenes, that the landscape takes its place as an actor in the drama of human life. That great masterpiece "The Return of the Native," is dominated by the changing strength and splendor of Egdon Heath. The opening lines, simple as they are, seem fraught with tragedy. "A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor." So far all is silence and immobility. Then a slow change takes place. The obscurity in the air fraternizes with the obscurity in the land, and Egdon Heath is turned to an animate, sentient body. "The place became full of a watchful intentness now," writes Mr. Hardy, "for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and

listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus unmoved during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis-the final overthrow." Such was Egdon, an "obscure, obsolete, superseded country," which Mr. Hardy looks upon in close relation with the human race. "It was at present a place," he writes, "perfectly accordant with man's nature neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly: neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities!" Its age, in Mr. Hardy's view, carries us much further back than the age of "the salt, unplumbed, estranging sea." He champions its antiquity with a sort of jealousy. "The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea anged, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained." and for this very reason, the sinister changelessness of Egdon Heath. "The Return of the Native" should not have had what is known in the circulating libraries as a "happy ending." A book which begins in foreboding should end in sadness. There should have been no marriage between Thomasin and the reddleman. And to this sombre end it was that Mr. Hardy designed the book. But the necessity of "serial publication" disposed it otherwise, and Mr. Hardy, putting the alternatives before us, leaves "those with an austere artistic code to assume the more consistent

conclusion to be the true one."

It must not be thought that the landscape which serves as a background to Mr. Hardy's novels is bleak and silent. Rather it is the scene of manifold activities and divers superstitions. We are told that the first book put into Mr. Hardy's boyish hands was Dryden's Virgil, and it is easy to perceive Virgil's wholesome influence. Never since the "Georgics" have the industries of the countryside been turned to literary account with so fine a sense of their enduring importance as in Mr. Hardy's novels of environment. "The Woodlanders" is redolent of the scent of cider-apples. The music of the axe, laid to the trunk of the tree, accompanies the tragedy of Giles Winterborne and Marty South. In one aspect, "Far From the Madding Crowd" is one long fight against the ill-omened forces of nature. Gabriel Oak finds his enemies in fire and storm. The scenes in which Gabriel saves the ricks from burning, and thatches the stacks against the oncoming deluge, are without a rival for truth and intensity in English literature. Indeed there is scarcely an episode in the life of a farm to which Mr. Hardy has not given a just expression. Nor is he content with a mere statement of the facts. He blends with the true vision of a keen observer the sentiment of the poet. Here you find the honeytakers at work; there is a perfect picture of sheep-shearing. Now there are troubles in the fold: the ewes have broken down the fence and got into a field of young clover. Now the reaping-machine "ticks like the love-making of a grasshopper." Men and women assert themselves or lose themselves in their environment. "A fieldman is a personality," writes Mr. Hardy; a fieldwoman is a portion of the field; she has somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surroundings, and assimilated herself with it." And

the immutable countryside, where three or four score years are included in the present, changes neither its picture nor its frame. The perfect blending of men with inanimate things is always before Mr. Hardy's eyes. In "Far From the Madding Crowd" "the barn is natural to the shearers, and the shearers are in harmony with the barn." With a fine eloquence Mr. Hardy paints the shearing-barn as a symbol of human permanence: "One could say about it," he writes, "what could hardly be said of the church or the castle, akin to it in age and style, that the taste which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied. The old barn embodied practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time. Here at least the spirit of the ancient builders was at one with the spirit of the modern beholder.

The fact that four centuries had neither proved it to be founded on a mistake, inspired any hatred of its purpose, nor given rise to any reaction that had battered it down, invested this simple grey effort of old minds with a repose, if not a grandeur, which a too curious reflection was apt to disturb in its ecclesiastical and military compeers. For once mediævalism and modernism had a common standpoint."

Thus it is that spiritually or architecturally the traditions of country life are preserved. Thus it is that the distance which separates Mr. Hardy from Virgil is no greater than the distance which separates the new Weatherbury from the old. "The citizen's Then is the rustic's Now." Thus it is that Mr. Hardy's rural sketches are touched with an eternal truth. "The dairy maids and men," it is written in "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," "had flocked down from their cottages and out of the dairy-house with the arrival of the cows from the meads; the maids walking in pattens, not on account of

the weather, but to keep their shoes above the mulch of the barton. Each girl sat down on her three-legged stool, her face sideways, her right cheek resting against the cow, and looked musingly along the animal's flank." Here, instead, we are in a world unaffected by the thing miscalled education, inspired by the follies of politicians, a world which is and will be always what it was. The fashions of the city may shift as they will. Tess and her companions will cross the barton in pattens and sit sideways against the cow until the end of time.

In

And Mr. Hardy's countryside is the home not only of industry, but of those primitive beliefs now rashly dismissed as "superstitions." the world of his painting the "forecaster" still foretells the weather at a price; the quack-salver vends his cheap cures, or offers for sale the love-philtres, which seemed of efficacy in the golden age. The old wives' remedies are known and practised; nothing but the fat of adders will cure an adder's bite. The belief in witchcraft still "lurks like a mole underneath the visible surface of manners." Susado Nunsuch, in "The Return of the Native," models Eustacia in wax, red-ribbon, sandal-shoes, and all, until the figure would have been recognized by any inhabitant of Egdon Heath. Then she thrusts pins of the long and yellow sort into the image in all directions, and at last watches it as it wastes away over the fire, repeating meanwhile the Lord's prayer backwards. Such incantations as this are as old as time itself, and prove again that past and present are inextricably mixed in the Wessex of Mr. Hardy's novels.

Vale and upland, farm and malthouse, are peopled by men and women old in fashion and speech as the cottages which shelter them, as the trees which give them shade. Mr. Hardy's

peasants look upon the action of his dramas with the close, impartial interest of a Greek chorus. They comment upon the tragedy which unfolds itself before their eyes with a shrewdness untainted by the cunning of the town, and in a language which would have been intelligible to our forefathers three centuries ago. Mr. Hardy is as happy in his use of the vernacular as Scott himself. Whenever he marshals his gossiping yokels upon the scene, his style assumes a happy propriety, a noble amplitude of expression. comments of the laborers upon Bathsheba Everdene in "Far From the Madding Crowd" are in the true vein:

The

"Be as 'twill, she's a fine handsome body as far's looks be concerned. But that's only the skin of the woman, and these dandy cattle be as proud as a lucifer in their insides."

"Ay-so 'a do seem, Billy Smallbory -so 'a do seem."

account, not we! We didn't want the folk to notice us as law officers, being so short-handed, sir; so we pushed our Government staves up this water-pipe." In pomp as in prudence, Stubberd falls not a whit behind his type, and the justice of the comparison proves the equal truth to nature of Shakespeare and Mr. Hardy.

We have sketched all too briefly the scene of Mr. Hardy's dramas; we have hinted at the part played by his chorus. The dramas themselves have an elemental largeness which befits their background. They are tense and simple, like the dramas of Sophocles. If Mr. Hardy very properly claimed for himself a freedom in the choice of material which most English novelists have denied themselves, he has permitted no license in the treatment of that material. In construction his stories are stern, even to rigidity. It is not for nothing that he passed his

"Yes-she's very vain. "Tis said that every night at going to bed she looks in the glass to put on her nightcap properly."

architecture. His fable, as the ancient critics called it, is expounded by no more than three or four characters, whose actions are directed by the harsh necessity of faith. They are the

And if in one aspect the Wessex peasants resemble the Greek chorus, in another they are the true heirs of Shakespeare's age. If they met their forebears of Elizabeth's reign there would be no hesitation between them, no misunderstanding. Christian Cantle. "a man of the mournfullest make," and William Worm, "a poor wambling body," are of the true breed. Dogberry still lives in modern England. "What can we two poor lammingers do against such a multitude!" exclaims Stubberd in "The Mayor of Casterbridge." ""Tis tempting 'un to commit felo de se upon us, and that would be the death of the perpetrator; and we wouldn't be the canse of a felow-creature's death on no

would have said, or of destiny. In vain they struggle against the doom which hangs over them. "We are but thistle-globes in Heaven's high gales," says Napoleon in "The Dynasts," and that line might serve as a motto for the best of Mr. Hardy's works. He is conscious also to whom he owes his debt:

"A life there was Among these self-same frail onesSophocles

Who visioned it too clearly, even the while

He dubbed the Will 'the gods.' Truly said he,

'Such gross injustice to their own creation

Burdens the time with mournfulness

for us,

And for themselves with shame.'"

There, set in another light, is his constant theme. Tess, "poor wounded name," is driven to her destruction by a fate which she is not strong enough to control. Henchard, the Mayor of Casterbridge, is the victim of his own strength and insolent triumph. Bathsheba, with no evil intent, unseats the reason of a good man, and falls herself a victim to a fickle rascal. It was written in the book of fate that Giles Winterborne should reject the worship of Marty South, and see himself rejected by Grace Melbury. In "Jude the Obscure" instinct and intellect engage in an unequal combat. Jude fails in all the ambitions of his life because he cannot sustain upon his weak shoulders the battle of the new against the old. For this submission to fate Mr. Hardy has been called a "pessimist." The charge is unjust as well as irrelevant. A man is not a pessimist because he perceives the obvious truth that all is not cakes and ale in this world. A cheerful determination to look upon what is called "the bright side of things" commonly means no more than a wilful blindness. In any case Mr. Hardy has seen life with an impartial eye, and has told us what he has discovered therein; and he does it with so fine a zest, that to charge him with pessimism is to suggest in him who brings the charge an inability to apply to a work of fiction any other test than the test of a happy ending.

If his dramas be simple in construction, Mr. Hardy spares no pains of complexity in the drawing of his characters. His women especially stand out with a clarity and personal distinction which it is not easy to match in modern literature. Eustacia, Bathsheba, Tess, Marty South, Lucetta-they are one and all alive, and easily recognizable. Even in Sue Bridehead. "the slight, pale, bachelor girl," so familiar to-day, was divined by the author. In the portraiture of men, Mr. Hardy is

now

not so happy and diverse. His faithful lovers, such as Gabriel Oak and Giles Winterborne, are almost too faithful to be true; and the Troys, the Wildeves, the Fitzpiers, the men who unworthily attract beautiful women, seem and then to be cut to a pattern. But even when we have played the devil's advocate, we can only pause in wonder before this gallery of modern portraits, seen by a visionary and drawn by a master.

Mr. Hardy did not find without a struggle the manner of his Wessex/ novels. In his earliest experiment he, who owes so little to his predecessors, readily submitted to the influence of his time. With perfect justice he calls "Desperate Remedies" a novel of ingenuity. So ingenious is it, with its plots and counterplots, that it reminds you of Wilkie Collins or Charles Dickens. There is a murder in it, and a sudden death, and a concealed birth, and all the apparatus of the fiction that was popular fifty years ago. Yet it contains the germ of the masterpieces, and it was presently followed, without intervention, by "Under the Greenwood Tree," a modern and exquisite version of "Daphnis and Chloe." And the juxtaposition of these two books is the more remarkable, because, when Mr. Hardy condescends to the romantic or the ingenious, he is sometimes beset by a sort of elfin freakishness. Surely it was a spirit of mischief which saw Viviette, in "Two in a Tower," married to a bishop; nor must "The Well-Beloved," who fell in love with three generations, be judged by the common standards. And Ethelberta, who, with her friends, wavers always on the borderland of comedy and farce, is a piece of whimsicality. Neigh and Ladywell, her lovers, seem to have stepped not out of life, but out of the works of the old comic writers, and the scene at Rouen, where Ethelberta hides a lover on each of three floors of the hotel.