PREFACE

Some of the essays in this volume have appeared in recent numbers of various periodicals. The essays on "Mark Twain" and "Thomas Hardy" were originally printed in the North American Review; those on "Mrs. Ward" and "Rudyard Kipling," in the Forum; those on "Alfred Ollivant," "Björnstjerne Björnson," and "Novels as a University Study," in the Independent. The same magazine contained a portion of the present essay on "Lorna Doone," while the article on "The Teacher's Attitude toward Contemporary Literature" was written for the Chicago Interior. My friend, Mr. Andrew Keogh, Reference Librarian of Yale University, has been kind enough to prepare the List of Publications, thereby increasing my debt to him for many previous favours.

W. L. P.

Yale University,
Tuesday, 5 October, 1909.

CONTENTS

ESSAYS ON MODERN NOVELISTS

I

"How can you know whether you are successful or not at forty-one? How do you know you won't have a tremendous success, all of a sudden? Yes—after another ten years, perhaps—but some time! And then twenty years of real, happy work. It has all been before, this sort of thing. Why not you?" Thus spoke the hopeful Alice to the despairing Charley; and it makes an interesting comment on the very man who wrote the conversation, and created the speakers. It has indeed "all been before, this sort of thing"; only when an extremely clever person, whose friends have always been saying, with an exclamation rather than an interrogation point appended, "Why don't you write a novel!" ... waits until he has passed his grand climacteric, he displays more faith in Providence than in himself. All of which is as it should be. Keats died at the age of twenty-five, but, from where I am now writing, I can reach his Poetical Works almost without leaving my chair; he is among the English Poets. Had Mr. De Morgan died at the age of twenty-five? The answer is, he didn't. I am no great believer in mute, inglorious Miltons, nor do I think that I daily pass potential novelists in the street. Life is shorter than Art, as has frequently been observed; but it seems long enough for Genius. Genius resembles murder in that it will out; you can no more prevent its expression than you can prevent the thrush from singing his song twice over. Crabbed age and youth have their peculiar accent. Keats, with all his glory, could not have written Joseph Vance, and Mr. De Morgan, with all his skill in ceramics, could not have fashioned the Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Sir Thomas Browne, who loved miracles, did not hesitate to classify the supposed importance of the grand climacteric as a vulgar error; he included a whole quaint chapter on the subject, in that old curiosity shop of literature, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica. "And so perhaps hath it happened unto the number 7. and 9. which multiplyed into themselves doe make up 63. commonly esteemed the great Climactericall of our lives; for the dayes of men are usually cast up by septenaries, and every seventh yeare conceived to carry some altering character with it, either in the temper of body, minde, or both; but among all other, three are most remarkable, that is, 7. times 7. or forty-nine, 9. times 9. or eighty-one, and 7. times 9. or the yeare of sixty-three; which is conceived to carry with it, the most considerable fatality, and consisting of both the other numbers was apprehended to comprise the vertue of either, is therefore expected and entertained with feare, and esteemed a favour of fate to pass it over; which notwithstanding many suspect but to be a Panick terrour, and men to feare they justly know not what; and for my owne part, to speak indifferently, I find no satisfaction, nor any sufficiency in the received grounds to establish a rationall feare."

Among various strong reasons against this superstition, Dr. Browne presents the impressive argument shown by the Patriarchs: "the lives of our forefathers presently after the flood, and more especially before it, who, attaining unto 8. or 900. yeares, had not their Climacters computable by digits, or as we doe account them; for the great Climactericall was past unto them before they begat children, or gave any Testimony of their virilitie, for we read not that any begat children before the age of sixtie five."

The strange case of William De Morgan would have deeply interested Sir Thomas, and he would have given it both full and minute consideration. For it was just after he had safely passed the climacterical year of sixty-three, that our now famous novelist began what is to us the most important chapter of his life, the first chapter of Joseph Vance; and, like the Patriarchs, it was only after he had reached the age of sixty-five that he became fruitful, producing those wonderful children of his brain that are to-day everywhere known and loved. Poets ripen early; if a man comes to his twenty-fifth birthday without having written some things supremely well, he may in most instances abandon all hope of immortality in song; but to every would-be novelist it is reasonable to whisper those encouraging words, "while there's life there's hope." Of the ten writers who may be classed as the greatest English novelists, only one—Charles Dickens—published a good novel before the age of thirty. Defoe's first fiction of any consequence was Robinson Crusoe, printed in 1719; he was then fifty-eight years old. Richardson had turned fifty before his earliest novel appeared. And although I can think at this moment of no case exactly comparable with that of the author of Joseph Vance, it is a book to which experience has contributed as well as inspiration, and would be something, if not inferior, at all events very different, had it been composed in early or in middle life. For it vibrates with the echoes of a long gallery, whose walls are crowded with interesting pictures.

The recent Romantic Revival has produced many novels that have enjoyed a brief and noisy popularity; its worst effects are noticeable on the minds of readers, unduly stimulated by the constant perusal of rapid-fire fiction. Many will not read further than the fourth page, unless some casualties have already occurred. To every writer who starts with some deliberation, they shout, "Leave your damnable faces and begin." Authors who produce for immediate consumption are prepared for this; so are the more clever men who write the publishers' advertisements. An announcement of a new work by an exceedingly fashionable novelist was headed by the appetising line, "This book goes with a rush, and ends with a smash." That would hardly do as a description of Clarissa Harlowe, Wilhelm Meister, or some other classics. To a highly nervous and irritably impatient reading public, a man whose name had no commercial value in literature gravely offered in the year of grace 1906 an "ill-written autobiography" of two hundred and eighty thousand words! Well, the result is what might not have been expected. If ever a confirmed optimist had reason to feel justification of his faith, Mr. De Morgan must have seen it in the reception given to his first novel.

Despite the great length of Mr. De Morgan's books, and the leisurely passages of comment and rather extraneous detail, he never begins slowly. No producer of ephemeral trash, no sensation-monger, has ever got under way with more speed, or taken a swifter initial plunge into the very heart of action. One memorable day in 1873, Count Tolstoi picked up a little story by Pushkin, which his ten-year-old son had been reading aloud to a member of the family. The great Russian glanced at the first sentence, "The guests began to assemble the evening before the fête." He was mightily pleased. "That's the way to begin a story!" he cried. "The reader is taken by one stroke into the midst of the action. Another writer would have commenced by describing the guests, the rooms, while Pushkin—he goes straight at his goal." Some of those in the room laughed, and suggested that Tolstoi himself appropriate such a beginning and write a novel. He immediately retired and wrote the first sentences of Anna Karenina; which is literally the manner in which that masterpiece came into being.[1] Now if one will open any of Mr. De Morgan's works, he will find the procedure that Tolstoi praised. Something immediately happens—happens before we have any idea of the real character of the agents, and before we hardly know where we are. Indeed, the first chapter of Somehow Good may serve as an artistic model for the commencement of a novel. It is written with extraordinary vivacity and spirit. But the author understands better how to begin his works than he does how to end them. The close of Joseph Vance is like the mouth of the Mississippi, running off into the open sea through a great variety of passages. The ending of Alice-for-Short is accomplished only by notes, comment, and citations. And Somehow Good is simply snipped off, when it might conceivably have proceeded on its way. His fourth novel is the only one that ends as well as it begins.

You cannot judge books, any more than you can individuals, by the first words they say. If I could only discover somewhere some man, woman, or child who had not read Joseph Vance, I should like to tell him the substance of the first chapter, and ask him to guess what sort of a story had awakened my enthusiasm. Suppose some person who had never heard of Browning should stumble on Pauline, and read the first three lines:—

one sees the sharp look of expectation on the reader's face, and one almost laughs aloud to think what there is in store for him. He will very soon exhibit symptoms of bewilderment, and before he has finished the second page he will push the book aside with an air of pious disappointment. No slum story ever opened more promisingly than Joseph Vance. We are led at the very start into a dirty rum-shop; there immediately ensues a fight between two half-drunken loafers in the darkness without; this results in the double necessity of the police and the hospital; and a broken bottle, found against a dead cat, is the missile employed to destroy a human eye. In Alice-for-Short, the first chapter shows us a ragged little girl of six carrying a jug of beer from a public-house to a foul basement, where dwell her father and mother, both victims of alcohol. The police again. On the third page of Somehow Good, we have the "fortune to strike on a rich vein of so-called life in a London slum." The hero gives a drunken, murderous scoundrel a "blow like the kick of a horse, that lands fairly on the eye socket with a cracking concussion that can be heard above the tumult, and is followed by a roar of delight from the male vermin." Once more the police. It Never Can Happen Again begins in a corner of London unspeakably vile.

Zola and Gorky at their best, and worst—for it is sometimes hard to make the distinction—have not often surpassed the first chapters of Mr. De Morgan's four novels. Never has a writer waded more unflinchingly into the slime. And yet the very last word to characterise these books would be the word "slum-stories." The foundations of Mr. De Morgan's work, like the foundations of cathedrals, are deep in the dirt; but the total impression is one of exceeding beauty. Indeed, with our novelist's conception of life, as a progress toward something high and sublime, where evil not only exists, but is a necessary factor in development, the darkness of the shadows proves the intense radiance of the sun. The planet Venus is so bright, we are accustomed to remark, that it sometimes casts a shadow. Christopher Vance emerges from beastly degradation to a position of power, influence, and usefulness; the Heath family, in receiving Alice, entertain an angel unawares; and the march of Somehow Good goes from hell, through purgatory, and into paradise. It is a divine comedy, in more ways than one; and shows that sometimes the goal of ill is very unlike the start.

We had not read far into Joseph Vance before we shouted Dickens Redivivus! or some equivalent remark in the vernacular. We made this outcry with no tincture of depreciation and with no yelp of the plagiarism-hunting hound. It requires little skill to observe the similarity to Dickens, as was proved by the fact that everyone noticed it. In general, the shout was one of glad recognition; it was the welcome given to the sound of a voice that had been still. It was not an imitation: it was a reincarnation. The spirit of Dickens had really entered into William De Morgan; many chapters in Joseph Vance sounded as if they had been dictated by the ghost of the author of Copperfield. No book since 1870 had given so vivid an impression of the best-beloved of all English novelists. This is meant to be high praise. When Walt Whitman was being exalted for his unlikeness to the great poets, one sensible critic quietly remarked, "It is easier to differ from the great poets than to resemble them." To "remind us of Dickens" would be as difficult for many modern novelists as for a molehill to remind us of the Matterhorn.

We may say, however, that Joseph Vance and It Never Can Happen Again are more like Dickens in character and in detail than is Alice-for-Short; and that the latter is closer to Dickens than is Somehow Good. The Reverend Benaiah Capstick infallibly calls to mind the spiritual adviser of Mrs. Weller; with the exception that the latter was also spirituous. That kind of religion does not seem strongly to appeal to either novelist; for Mr. Stiggins took to drink, and Capstick to an insane asylum. There are many things in the conversation of Christopher Vance that recall the humorous world-wisdom of the elder Weller; and so we might continue, were it profitable. Another great point of resemblance between Mr. De Morgan and Dickens is seen in the method of narration chosen by each. Here William De Morgan is simply following in the main track of English fiction, where the novelist cannot refrain from editing the text of the story. The course of events is constantly interrupted by the author's gloss. Now when the author's mind is not particularly interesting, the comment is an unpleasant interruption; it is both impertinent and dull. But when the writer is himself more profound, more clever, and more entertaining than even his best characters, we cannot have too much of him. It is true that Mr. De Morgan has told a good story in each of his novels; but it is also true that the story is not the cause of their reputation. We read these books with delight because the characters are so attractive, and because the author's comments on them and on events are so penetrating. If it is true, as some have intimated, that this method of novel-writing proves that Mr. De Morgan, whatever he is, is not a literary artist, then it is undeniable that Fielding, Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray are not artists; which is absurd, as Euclid would say. Great books are invariably greater than our definitions of them. Browning and Wagner composed great works of Art without paying much attention to the rules of the game.

As compared with French and Russian fiction, English novels from Fielding to De Morgan have unquestionably sounded a note of insincerity. One reason for this lies in the fact that to the Anglo-Saxon mind, Morality has always seemed infinitely more important than Art. Matthew Arnold spent his life fighting the Philistines; but when he said that conduct was three-fourths of life, there was jubilation in the enemy's camp. Now Zola declared that a novel could no more be called immoral in its descriptions than a text-book on physiology; the novelist commits a sin when he writes a badly constructed sentence. A disciple of this school insisted that it was more important to have an accurate sense of colour than to have a clear notion of right and wrong. Fortunately for the true greatness of humanity, you never can get the average Englishman or American to swallow such doctrine. But it is at the same time certain that among English-speaking peoples Art has seldom been taken with sufficient seriousness. We are handy with our fists; but you cannot imagine us using them in behalf of literature, as we do for real or personal property. So far as I know, an English audience in the theatre has never been excited on a purely artistic question—a matter of frequent occurrence on the Continent. We seem to believe that, after all, Art has no place in the serious business of life; it is a recreation, to amuse a mind overstrained by money-making or by political affairs. We leave it to women, who are supposed to have more leisure for trifles.

For this reason, English novelists have generally felt compelled to treat their public as a tired mother treats a restless child. Our novelists have been in mortal terror lest the attention of their audience should wander; and instead of taking their work and their readers seriously, they continually hand us lollipops. Their attitude is at once apologetic and insulting. They do not dare to believe that a great work of Art—without personal comment—has in itself moral greatness, and they do not dare trust the intelligence of spectators, but must forsooth constantly break the illusion by soothing or explanatory remarks. The fact that in our greatest writers this is often presented from the standpoint of humour, does not prevent the loss of illusion; and in writers who are not great, the reader feels nothing but indignation. In the first chapter of the third book of Amelia, we find the following advice:—

"He then proceeded as Miss Matthews desired; but, lest all our readers should not be of her opinion, we will, according to our usual custom, endeavour to accommodate ourselves to every taste, and shall, therefore, place this scene in a chapter by itself, which we desire all our readers who do not love, or who, perhaps, do not know the pleasure of tenderness, to pass over; since they may do this without any prejudice to the thread of the narrative."

In the first chapter of Shirley, Charlotte Brontë prologises as follows:—

"If you think ... that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken.... Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid lies before you;... It is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting, perhaps toward the middle and close of the meal, but it is resolved that the first dish set upon the table shall be one that a Catholic—ay, even an Anglo-Catholic—might eat on Good Friday in Passion Week; it shall be cold lentils and vinegar without oil; it shall be unleavened bread with bitter herbs, and no roast lamb."

William Black once wrote a novel called Madcap Violet, which he intended for a tragedy, and in which, therefore, we have a right to expect some artistic dignity. About midway in the volume we find the following:—

"At this point, and in common courtesy to his readers, the writer of these pages considers himself bound to give fair warning that the following chapter deals solely and wholly with the shooting of mergansers, curlews, herons, and such like fearful wild fowl; therefore, those who regard such graceless idling with aversion, and are anxious to get on with the story, should at once proceed to chapter twenty-three."

At the beginning of the second chapter of Dr. Thorne, one of the best of Trollope's novels, we are petted in this manner:—

"A few words must still be said about Miss Mary before we rush into our story; the crust will then have been broken, and the pie will be open to the guests."

At the three hundred and seventy-second page of the late Marion Crawford's entertaining story, The Prima Donna, the course of the narrative is thus interrupted:—

"Now at this stage of my story it would be unpardonable to keep my readers in suspense, if I may suppose that any of them have a little curiosity left. Therefore, I shall not narrate in detail what happened Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, seeing that it was just what might have been expected to happen at a week-end party during the season when there is nothing in the world to do but to play golf, tennis, or croquet, or to write or drive all day, and to work hard at bridge all the evening; for that is what it has come to."

Finally, in the first chapter of Mr. Winston Churchill's novel, Coniston, the author pleads with his reader in this style:—

"The reader is warned that this first love-story will, in a few chapters, come to an end; and not to a happy end—otherwise there would be no book. Lest he should throw the book away when he arrives at this page, it is only fair to tell him that there is another and much longer love-story later on, if he will only continue to read, in which, it is hoped, he may not be disappointed."

Imagine Turgenev or Flaubert scribbling anything similar to the interpolations quoted above! When a great French novelist does condescend to speak to his reader, it is in a tone, that so far from belittling his own art, or sugaring the expectation of his listener, has quite the contrary effect. On the second page of Père Goriot, we find the following solemn warning:—

"Ainsi ferez-vous, vous qui tenez ce livre d'une main blanche, vous qui vous enfoncez dans un molleux fauteuil en vous disant: 'Peut-être ceci va-t-il m'amuser.' Après avoir lu les secrètes infortunes du père Goriot, vous dînerez avec appétit en mettant votre insensibilité sur le compte de l'auteur, en le taxant d'exagération, en l'accusant de poésie. Ah! sachez-le: ce drame n'est ni une fiction ni un roman. All is true, il est si véritable, que chacun peut en reconnaître les éléments chez soi, dans son cœur peut-être."

The chief objection to these constant remarks to the reader, so common in great English novels, is that they for the moment destroy the illusion. Suppose an actress in the midst of Ophelia's mad scene should suddenly pause and address the audience in her own accents in this wise: "I observe that some ladies among the spectators are weeping, and that some men are yawning. Allow me to say to those of you who dislike tragic events on the stage, that I shall remain here only a few moments longer, and shall not have much to say; and that if you will only be patient, the grave-diggers will come on before long, and it is probable that their conversation will amuse you."

The two reasons given above, the fear that a novel unexplained by author's comment will not justify itself morally, and that at all hazards the gentle reader must be placated and entertained, undoubtedly partly explain a long tradition in the course of English fiction. But while we may protest against this sort of thing in general, it is well to remember that we must take our men of genius as we find them, and rejoice that they have seen fit to employ any channel of expression. There are many different kinds of great novels, as there are of great poems. The fact that Tennyson's poetry belongs to the first class does not in the least prevent the totally different poetry of Browning from being ranked equally high. Joseph Vance is a very different kind of novel from The Return of the Native, but both awaken our wonder and delight. There are some books that inspire us by their art, and there are others that inspire us by their ideas. Turgenev was surely a greater artist than Tolstoi, but Anna Karenina is a veritable piece of life.

I do not say that William De Morgan is not a great artist, because, if I should say it, I should not know exactly what I meant. But the immense pleasure that his books give me is another kind of pleasure than I receive from The Scarlet Letter. Joseph Vance is not so much a beautifully written or exquisitely constructed novel as it is an encyclopædia of life. We meet real people, we hear delightful conversation, and the tremendously interesting personality of the author is everywhere apparent. The opinion of many authors concerning immortality is not worth attention; but I should very much like to know Mr. De Morgan's views on this absorbing subject. And so I turn to the fortieth chapter of Joseph Vance with great expectations. The reader is advised to skip this chapter, a sure indication of its importance. For, like all humorists, Mr. De Morgan is a bit shamefaced when he talks about the deepest things, the things that really interest him most. It surely will not do to have Dr. Thorpe talk like the Reverend Mr. Capstick, although they both eagerly discuss what we call the supernatural. Capstick is an ass, but he has one characteristic that we might, to a certain extent, imitate; he sees no reason to apologise for conversing on great topics, or to break up such a conversation with an embarrassed laugh. Most of us are horribly afraid of being taken for sanctimonious persons, when there is really not the slightest danger. We are always pleasantly surprised when we discover that our friends are at heart just as serious as we are, and that they, too, regret the mask of flippancy that our Anglo-Saxon false modesty compels us to wear. But, as some one has said, you cannot expect your audience to take your views seriously unless you express them with seriousness. Mr. De Morgan, like Robert Browning, would doubtless deny that Dr. Thorpe spoke only the author's thoughts; but just as you can hear Browning's voice all through those "utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine," so I feel confident that amid all the light banter of this charming talk in the fortieth chapter, the following remark of Dr. Thorpe expresses the philosophy of William De Morgan, and at the same time the basal moral principle underlying this entire novel:—"The highest good is the growth of the Soul, and the greatest man is he who rejoices most in great fulfilments of the will of God."

For although Mr. De Morgan belongs, like Dickens, to the great humorists, who, while keenly conscious of the enormous difference between right and wrong, regard the world with a kindly smile for human weakness and folly, he is mainly a psychologist. To all of his novels he might appropriately have prefixed the words of the author of Sordello: "My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study." All the characters that he loves show soul-development; the few characters that are unlovely have souls that do not advance. Joseph, Lossie, Janey, Alicia, Charles Heath, Rosalind, Athelstan, have the inner man renewed day by day; one feels that at physical death such personalities proceed naturally into a sphere of eternal progress. On the other hand, Joey's soul stands still; so do the souls of Violet, Lavinia Straker, Mrs. Vereker, Mrs. Eldridge, Judith, and Mrs. Craik. Why should they live for ever? They would always be the same. This is the real distinction in these novels between people that are fundamentally good and those that are fundamentally bad; whether their badness causes tragedy or merely constant irritation. It is an original manner of dividing virtue from vice, but it is illuminating.

The events in Mr. De Morgan's books are improbable, but the people are probable. The same might be said of Shakespeare. It is highly improbable that Christopher Vance could have risen to fortune through his sign-board, or that Fenwick should have been electrocuted at the feet of his wife's daughter. But Christopher Vance, Fenwick, and Sally behave precisely as people would behave in such emergencies in real life. In many ways I think Christopher Vance is the most convincing character in all the novels; at any rate, I had rather hear him talk than any of the others. There is no trace of meanness in him, and even when he is drunk he is never offensive or disgusting. The day after he has returned intoxicated from a meeting of the Board of Arbitrators, he seems rather inquisitive as to his exact condition, and asks his son:—

"I wasn't singin' though, Nipper, was I?" I said certainly not! "Not 'a Landlady of France she loved an Officer, 'tis said,' nor 'stick 'em up again in the middle of a three-cent pie'?"

"Neither of them—quite certain." My father seemed reassured. "That's something, anyhow," said he. "The other Arbitrators was singin' both. Likewise 'Rule Britannia.' Weak-headed cards, the two on 'em!"

The scene at Christopher Vance's death-bed, when Joseph finally discloses the identity of the boy who threw the piece of glass into the eye of the Sweep, touches the depths of true pathos. One feels the infinite love of the father for the little son who defended him. He is quite rightly prouder of that exploit than of all the Nipper's subsequent learning.

While the imaginary events in this novel bear no sort of relation to the circumstances of the author's own life, I cannot help launching the mere guess that the father of William De Morgan was, to a certain extent, a combination of Christopher Vance and Dr. Thorpe. For Augustus De Morgan was not only a distinguished mathematical scholar, he was well-known for the keenness of his wit. He had the learning and refinement of Dr. Thorpe, and the shrewd, irresistible humour of old Vance. At all events, this striking combination in the novelist can be traced to no more probable source.

The influence of good women on men's lives is repeatedly shown; it is indeed a leading principle in three of the books. One of the most notable differences in novels that reflect a pessimistic Weltanschauung from those that indicate the contrary may be seen right here. How completely the whole significance of the works of Guy de Maupassant would change had he included here and there some women who combined virtue with personal charm! "Were there no women, men would live like gods," said a character in one of Dekker's plays; judged by much modern fiction, one would feel like trying the experiment. But what would become of Mr. De Morgan's novels, and of the attitude toward life they so clearly reflect, if they contained no women? Young Joseph Vance was fortunate indeed in having in his life the powerful influence of two such characters as Lossie Thorpe and Janey Spencer. They were what a compass is to a shipman, taking him straight on his course through the blackest storms. It was for Lossie that he made the greatest sacrifice in his whole existence; and nothing pays a higher rate of moral interest than a big sacrifice. It was Janey who led him from the grossness of earth into the spiritual world, something that Lossie, with all her loveliness, could not do. Both women show that there is nothing inherently dull in goodness; it may be accompanied with some esprit. We are too apt to think that moral goodness is represented by such persons as the Elder Brother in the story of the Prodigal Son, when the parable indicates that the younger brother, with all his crimes, was actually the more virtuous of the two. It took no small skill for Mr. De Morgan to create such an irresistibly good woman as Lossie, make his hero in love with her from boyhood, cause her to marry some one else, and then to unite the heart-broken hero with another girl; and through these tremendous upheavals to make all things work together for good, and to the reader's complete satisfaction. This could not possibly have been accomplished had not the author been able to fashion a woman, who, while totally unlike Lossie in every physical and mental aspect, was spiritually even more attractive. I am not sure which of the two girls has the bigger place in their maker's heart; I suspect it is Lossie; but to me Janey is not only a better woman, I really have a stronger affection for her.

In Alice-for-Short, the hero is again blessed with two guardian angels, his sister and his second wife. Mr. De Morgan is extremely generous to his favourite men, in permitting either their second choice or their second experiment in matrimony to prove such an amazing success. Comparatively few novelists dare to handle the problem of happy second marriages; the subject for some reason does not lend itself readily to romance. Josh Billings said he knew of absolutely nothing that would cure a man of laziness; but that a second wife would sometimes help. Although he said this in the spirit of farce, it is exactly what happens in Mr. De Morgan's books. Janey is not technically a second wife, but she is spiritually; and she rescues Joseph from despair, restores his ambition and capacity to work, and after her death is like a guiding star. Alice is a second wife, both in her husband's heart and in the law; and her influence on Charles Heath provides exactly the stimulus needed to save him from himself. Fenwick marries for the second time, and although his wife is in one sense the same person, in another she is not; she is quite different in everything except constancy from the wretched girl he left sobbing on the verandah in India. And what would have become of Fenwick without the mature Rosalind? Salvation, in Mr. De Morgan's novels, often assumes a feminine shape. They are not books of Friendship, like The Cloister and the Hearth, Trilby, and Es War; with all their wonderful intelligence and play of intellect, they would seem almost barren without women. And he is far more successful in depicting love after marriage than before. One of the most charming characteristics of these stories is the frequent representation of the highest happiness known on earth—not found in the passion of early youth, but in a union of two hearts cemented by joy and sorrow in the experience of years. No novelist has ever given us better pictures of a good English home; more attractive glimpses into the reserveless intimacy of the affairs of the hearth. The conversations between Christopher Vance and his wife, between Sir Rupert and Lady Johnson, between Fenwick and Rosalind, are decidedly superior to the "love-making" scenes. Indeed, the description of the walk during which young Dr. Vereker definitely wins Sally, is disappointing. It is perhaps the only important episode in Mr. De Morgan's novels that shows more effort than inspiration.

The style in these books, despite constant quotation, is not at all a literary style. Joseph Vance is called "an ill-written autobiography," because it lacks entirely the conventional manner. Many works of fiction are composed in what might be called the terminology of the art; just as works in science and in sport are compelled to repeat constantly the same verbal forms. The astonishing freshness and charm of Mr. De Morgan's method consist partly in his abandonment of literary precedent, and adhering only to actual observation. It is as though an actor on the stage should suddenly drop his mannerism of accent and gesture, and behave as he would were he actually, instead of histrionically, happy or wretched. Despite the likeness to Dickens in characters and atmosphere, Joseph Vance sounds not only as though its author had never written a novel previously, but as though he had never read one. It has the strangeness of reality. There is no lack of action in these huge narratives: the men and women pass through the most thrilling incidents, and suffer the greatest extremes of passion, pain, and joy that the human mind can endure. We have three cases of drowning, one tremendous fire; and in Somehow Good—which, viewed merely as a story, is the best of them—a highly eventful plot; and, spiritually, the characters give us an idea of how much agony the heart can endure without quite breaking. But though the bare plot seems almost like melodrama, the style is never on stilts. In the most awful crises, the language has the absolute simplicity of actual circumstance. When Rosalind recognises her husband in the cab, we wonder why she takes it so coolly. Some sixty pages farther along, we come upon this paragraph:—

"Nevertheless, these were not so absolute that her demeanour escaped comment from the cabby, the only witness of her first sight of the 'electrocuted' man. He spoke of her afterwards as that squealing party down that sanguinary little turning off Shepherd's Bush Road he took that sanguinary galvanic shock to."

Our author is fond of presenting events of the most momentous consequence through the lips of humble and indifferent observers. It is only the cabman's chance testimony which shows us that even Rosalind's superb self-control had the limit determined by real womanhood; and in Joseph Vance, the great climax of emotion, when Lossie visits her maligned old lover, is given with unconscious force through the faulty vernacular of the "slut" of a servant-maid, who is utterly unaware of the angels that ministered over that scene; and then by the broken English of the German chess-player, equally blind to the divine presence. Compare these two crude testimonies, which make the ludicrous blunders made by the Hostess in that marvellous account of the death of Falstaff, and you have a veritable harmony of the Gospels. Some novelists use an extraordinary style to describe ordinary events; Mr. De Morgan uses an ordinary style to describe extraordinary events.

Even in his latest book, It Never Can Happen Again,[2] the least cheerful of all his productions, the title is intended to be as comforting as Charles Reade's caption, It Is Never Too Late to Mend. In this story, Mr. De Morgan descends into hell. Delirium tremens has never been pictured with more frightful horror than in the awful night when the mad wretch is bent on murder. No scene in any naturalistic novel surpasses this in vivid detail. Indeed, all of Mr. De Morgan's books might well be circulated as anti-alcohol tracts; the real villain in his tragedies is Drink. Even though drunkenness in a certain aspect supplies comedy in Joseph Vance, drink is, after all, the ruin of old Christopher, and we are left with no shade of doubt that this is so. Mr. De Morgan's unquestionable optimism does not blink the dreadful aspects of life, any more than did Browning's. The scene in the hospital, where the fingers without finger-nails clasp the mighty hand in the rubber glove, is as loathsomely horrible as anything to be found in the annals of disease. And the career of Blind Jim, entirely ignorant of his divine origin and destiny, is a series of appalling calamities. He has lost his sight in a terrible accident; he is run over by a waggon, and loses his leg; he is run over by an automobile, and loses his life. He has also lost, though he does not know it, what is far dearer to him than eyes, or legs, or life,—his little daughter. And yet we do not need the spirit voice of the dead child to assure us that all is well. Indeed, the tragic history of Jim and Lizarann is not nearly so depressing as the humdrum narrative of the melancholy quarrel between Mr. and Mrs. Challis. In previous novels, the author has been pleased to show us domestic happiness; here we have the dreary round of perpetual discord. Of course no one can complain of Mr. De Morgan for his choice in this matter; it is certainly true that not all marriages are happy, even though the majority of them (as I believe) are. The difficulty is that the triangle in this book—husband, wife, and beautiful young lady—has no corner of real interest. It is not entirely the fault of either Mr. or Mrs. Challis that they separate; there is much to be said on both sides. What we object to is the fact that it is impossible to sympathise with either of them; this is not because each is guilty, but because neither is interesting. We do not much care what becomes of them. And as for Judith, the technical virgin who causes all the trouble, she is a very dull person. We do not need this book to learn that female beauty without brains fascinates the ordinary man. The best scenes are those where Blind Jim and Lizarann appear; they are a couple fully worthy of Dickens at his best. Unfortunately they do not appear often enough to suit us, and they both die. We could more easily have spared Mr. and Mrs. Challis, the latter's abominable tea-gossip friend, and that old hypocritical tiger-cat, Mrs. Challis's mother. Why does Mr. De Morgan make elderly women so disgustingly unattractive? Does his sympathy with life desert him here? The entire Challis household, including the satellites of relationship and propinquity, are hardly worth the author's skill or the reader's attention. One would suppose that a brilliant novelist, like Challis, pulled from the domestic orbit by a comet like Judith, would be for a time in an interesting, if not an edifying, position; but he is not. Perhaps Mr. De Morgan wishes to show with the impartiality of a true chronicler of life that a married man, drawn away by his own lust, and enticed, can be just as dull in sin as in virtue. Yet the long dreary family storm ends in sunshine; the discordant pair are redeemed by Love,—the real motive power of this story,—and one feels that it can never happen again. In spite of Mr. De Morgan's continual onslaught on creeds, Athelstan Taylor, who believes the whole Apostles' Creed, compares very favourably with Challis, who believes only the first seven and the last four words of it, apparently the portion accepted by Mr. De Morgan: and by their fruits ye shall know them. It is certainly a proof of the fair-mindedness of our novelist, that he has created orthodox believers like Lossie's husband and Athelstan Taylor, big wholesome fellows, both of them; and has deliberately made both so irresistibly attractive. The professional parson is often ridiculed in modern novels; it is worth noting that in this story the only important character in the whole work who combines intelligence with virtue is the Reverend Athelstan Taylor.

Seldom have any books shown so intimate a knowledge of the kingdom of this world and at the same time reflected with such radiance the kingdom of heaven. It is noteworthy and encouraging that a man who portrays with such humorous exactitude the things that are seen and temporal, should exhibit so firm a faith in the things that are unseen and eternal. In Joseph Vance we have the growth of the soul from an environment of poverty and crime to the loftiest heights of nobility and self-denial; and the theme in the Waldstein Sonata triumphantly repeats the confidence of Dr. Thorpe, who regards death not as a barrier, but as a gateway. In Alice-for-Short, the mystery of the spirit-world completely envelops the humdrum inconsistencies that form the daily round, the trivial task; this is seen perhaps not so much in the "ghosts," for they speak of the past; but the figure of old Verrinder—whose heart revolves about the Asylum like the planet around the sun—and the waking of old Jane from her long sleep, seem to symbolise the impotence of Time to quench the divine spark of Love. This story is called a "dichronism"; but it might have been called a dichroism, for from one viewpoint it reflects only the clouded colour of earth, and from another a celestial glory. In Somehow Good the ugliest tragedy takes its place in the unapparent order of life. It is not that good finally reigns in spite of evil; the final truth is that in some manner good is the very goal of ill. The agony of separation has tested the pure metal of character; and the fusion of two lives is made permanent in the frightful heat of awful pain. The fruit of a repulsive sin may be Beauty, like a flower springing from a dung-hill. "What became of the baby?... The baby—his baby—his horrible baby!" "Gerry darling! Gerry dearest! do think...."

II

The father of Thomas Hardy wished his son to enter the church, and this object was the remote goal of his early education. At just what period in the boy's mental development Christianity took on the form of a meaningless fable, we shall perhaps never know; but after a time he ceased to have even the faith of a grain of mustard seed. This absence of religious belief has proved no obstacle to many another candidate for the Christian ministry, as every habitual church-goer knows; or as any son of Belial may discover for himself by merely reading the prospectus of summer schools of theology. There has, however, always been a certain cold, mathematical precision in Mr. Hardy's way of thought that would have made him as uncomfortable in the pulpit as he would have been in an editor's chair, writing for salary persuasive articles containing the exact opposite of his individual convictions. But, although the beauty of holiness failed to impress his mind, the beauty of the sanctuary was sufficiently obvious to his sense of Art. He became an ecclesiastical architect, and for some years his delight was in the courts of the Lord. Instead of composing sermons in ink, he made sermons in stones, restoring to many a decaying edifice the outlines that the original builder had seen in his vision centuries ago. For no one has ever regarded ancient churches with more sympathy and reverence than Mr. Hardy. No man to-day has less respect for God and more devotion to His house.

Mr. Hardy's professional career as an architect extended over a period of about thirteen years, from the day when the seventeen-year-old boy became articled, to about 1870, when he forsook the pencil for the pen. His strict training as an architect has been of enormous service to him in the construction of his novels, for skill in constructive drawing has repeatedly proved its value in literature. Rossetti achieved positive greatness as an artist and as a poet. Stevenson's studies in engineering were not lost time, and Mr. De Morgan affords another good illustration of the same fact. Thackeray was unconsciously learning the art of the novelist while he was making caricatures, and the lesser Thackeray of a later day—George du Maurier—found the transition from one art to the other a natural progression. Hopkinson Smith and Frederic Remington, on a lower but dignified plane, bear witness to the same truth. Indeed, when one studies carefully the beginnings of the work of imaginative writers, one is surprised at the great number who have handled an artist's or a draughtsman's pencil. A prominent and successful playwright of to-day has said that if he were not writing plays, he should not dream of writing books; he would be building bridges.

Mr. Hardy's work as an ecclesiastical architect laid the real foundations of his success as a novelist; for it gave him an intimate familiarity with the old monuments and rural life of Wessex, and at the same time that eye for precision of form that is so noticeable in all his books. He has really never ceased to be an architect. Architecture has contributed largely to the matter and to the style of his stories. Two architects appear in his first novel. In A Pair of Blue Eyes Stephen Smith is a professional architect, and in coming to restore the old Western Church he was simply repeating the experience of his creator. No one of Mr. Hardy's novels contains more of the facts of his own life than A Laodicean, which was composed on what the author then believed to be his death-bed; it was mainly dictated, which I think partly accounts for its difference in style from the other tales. The hero, Somerset, is an architect whose first meeting with his future wife occurs through his professional curiosity concerning the castle; and a considerable portion of the early chapters is taken up with architectural detail, and of his enforced rivalry with a competitor in the scheme for restoration. Not only does Mr. Hardy's scientific profession speak through the mouths of his characters, but old and beautiful buildings adorn his pages as they do the landscape he loves. In Two on a Tower the ancient structure appears here and there in the story as naturally and incidentally as it would to a pedestrian in the neighbourhood; in A Pair of Blue Eyes the church tower plays an important part in a thrilling episode, and its fall emphasises a Scripture text in a diabolical manner. The old church at Weatherbury is so closely associated with the life history of the men and women in Far from the Madding Crowd that as one stands in front of it to-day the people seem to gather again about its portal....

But while Mr. Hardy has drawn freely on his knowledge of architecture in furnishing animate and inanimate material for his novels, the great results of his youthful training are seen in a more subtle and profounder influence. The intellectual delight that we receive in the perusal of his books—a delight that sometimes makes us impatient with the work of feebler authors—comes largely from the architectonics of his literary structures. One never loses sight of Hardy the architect. In purely constructive skill he has surpassed all his contemporaries. His novels—with the exception of Desperate Remedies and Jude the Obscure—are as complete and as beautiful to contemplate as a sculptor's masterpiece. They are finished and noble works of art, and give the same kind of pleasure to the mind as any superbly perfect outline. Mr. Hardy himself firmly believes that the novel should first of all be a story: that it should not be a thesis, nor a collection of reminiscences or obiter dicta. He insists that a novel should be as much of a whole as a living organism, where all the parts—plot, dialogue, character, and scenery—should be fitly framed together, giving the single impression of a completely harmonious building. One simply cannot imagine him writing in the manner of a German novelist, with absolutely no sense of proportion; nor like the mighty Tolstoi, who steadily sacrifices Art on the altar of Reality; nor like the great English school represented by Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, and De Morgan, whose charm consists in their intimacy with the reader; they will interrupt the narrative constantly to talk it over with the merest bystander, thus gaining his affection while destroying the illusion. Mr. Hardy's work shows a sad sincerity, the noble austerity of the true artist, who feels the dignity of his art and is quite willing to let it speak for itself.

His earliest novel, Desperate Remedies, is more like an architect's first crude sketch than a complete and detailed drawing. Strength, originality, and a thoroughly intelligent design are perfectly clear; one feels the impelling mind behind the product. But it resembles the plan of a good novel rather than a novel itself. The lines are hard; there is a curious rigidity about the movement of the plot which proceeds in jerks, like a machine that requires frequent winding up. The manuscript was submitted to a publishing firm, who, it is interesting to remember, handed it over to their professional reader, George Meredith. Mr. Meredith told the young author that his work was promising; and he said it in such a way that the two men became life-long friends, there being no more jealousy between them than existed between Tennyson and Browning. Years later Mr. Meredith said that he regarded Mr. Hardy as the real leader of contemporary English novelists; and the younger man always maintained toward his literary adviser an attitude of sincere reverence, of which his poem on the octogenarian's death was a beautiful expression. There is something fine in the honest friendship and mutual admiration of two giants, who cordially recognise each other above the heads of the crowd, and who are themselves placidly unmoved by the fierce jealousy of their partisans. In this instance, despite a total unlikeness in literary style, there was genuine intellectual kinship. Mr. Meredith and Mr. Hardy were both Pagans and regarded the world and men and women from the Pagan standpoint, though the deduction in one case was optimism and in the other pessimism. Given the premises, the younger writer's conclusions seem more logical; and the processes of his mind were always more orderly than those of his brilliant and irregular senior. There is little doubt (I think) as to which of the two should rank higher in the history of English fiction, where fineness of Art surely counts for something. Mr. Hardy is a great novelist; whereas to adapt a phrase that Arnold applied to Emerson, I should say that Mr. Meredith was not a great novelist; he was a great man who wrote novels.

Immediately after the publication of Desperate Remedies, which seemed to teach him, as Endymion taught Keats, the highest mysteries of his art, Mr. Hardy entered upon a period of brilliant and splendid production. In three successive years, 1872, 1873, and 1874, he produced three masterpieces—Under the Greenwood Tree, A Pair of Blue Eyes, and Far from the Madding Crowd; followed four years later by what is, perhaps, his greatest contribution to literature, The Return of the Native. Even in literary careers that last a long time, there seem to be golden days when the inspiration is unbalked by obstacles. It is interesting to contemplate the lengthy row of Scott's novels, and then to remember that The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor and Ivanhoe were published in three successive years; to recall that the same brief span covered in George Eliot's work the production of Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and The Mill on the Floss; and one has only to compare what Mr. Kipling accomplished in 1888, 1889, and 1890 with any other triennial, to discover when he had what the Methodists call "liberty." Mr. Hardy's career as a writer has covered about forty years; omitting his collections of short tales, he has written fourteen novels; from 1870 to 1880, inclusive, seven appeared; from 1881 to 1891, five; from 1892 to 1902, two; since 1897 he has published no novels at all. With that singular and unfortunate perversity which makes authors proudest of their lamest offspring, Mr. Hardy has apparently abandoned the novel for poetry and the poetic drama. I suspect that praise of his verse is sweeter to him than praise of his fiction; but, although his poems are interesting for their ideas, and although we all like the huge Dynasts better than we did when we first saw it, it is a great pity from the economic point of view that the one man who can write novels better than anybody else in the same language should deliberately choose to write something else in which he is at his very best only second rate. The world suffers the same kind of economic loss (less only in degree) that it suffered when Milton spent twenty years of his life in writing prose; and when Tolstoi forsook novels for theology.

It is probable that one reason why Mr. Hardy quit novel-writing was the hostile reception that greeted Jude the Obscure. Every great author, except Tennyson, has been able to endure adverse criticism, whether he hits back, like Pope and Byron, or whether he proceeds on his way in silence. But no one has ever enjoyed or ever will enjoy misrepresentation; and there is no doubt that the writer of Jude felt that he had been cruelly misunderstood. It is, I think, the worst novel he has ever written, both from the moral and from the artistic point of view; but the novelist was just as sincere in his intention as when he wrote the earlier books. The difficulty is that something of the same change had taken place in his work that is so noticeable in that of Björnson; he had ceased to be a pure artist and had become a propagandist. The fault that marred the splendid novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles ruined Jude the Obscure. When Mr. Hardy wrote on the title-page of Tess the words, "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented," he issued defiantly the name of a thesis which the story (great, in spite of this) was intended to defend. To a certain extent, his interest in the argument blinded his artistic sense; otherwise he would never have committed the error of hanging his heroine. The mere hanging of a heroine may not be in itself an artistic blunder, for Shakespeare hanged Cordelia. But Mr. Hardy executed Tess because he was bound to see his thesis through. In the prefaces to subsequent editions the author turned on his critics, calling them "sworn discouragers of effort," a phrase that no doubt some of them deserved; and then, like many another man who believes in himself, he punished both critics and the public in the Rehoboam method by issuing Jude the Obscure. Instead of being a masterpiece of despair, like The Return of the Native, this book is a shriek of rage. Pessimism, which had been a noble ground quality of his earlier writings, is in Jude merely hysterical and wholly unconvincing. The author takes obvious pains to make things come out wrong; as in melodramas and childish romances, the law of causation is suspended in the interest of the hero's welfare. Animalism, which had partially disfigured Tess, became gross and revolting in Jude; and the representation of marriage and the relations between men and women, instead of being a picture of life, resembled a caricature. It is a matter of sincere regret that Mr. Hardy has stopped novel-writing, but we want no more Judes. Didactic pessimism is not good for the novel.

The Well-Beloved, published in 1897, but really a revision of an earlier tale, is in a way a triumph of Art. The plot is simply absurd, almost as whimsical as anything in Alice in Wonderland. A man proposes to a young girl and is rejected; when her daughter is grown, he proposes to the representative of the second generation, and with the same ill fortune. When her daughter reaches maturity, he tries the third woman in line and without success. His perseverance was equalled only by his bad luck, as so often happens in Mr. Hardy's stories. And yet, with a plot that would wreck any other novelist, the author constructed a powerful and beautifully written novel. It is as though the architect had taken a wretched plan and yet somehow contrived to erect on its false lines a handsome building. The book has naturally added nothing to his reputation, but as a tour de force it is hard to surpass.

It is pleasant to remember that a man's opinion of his own work has nothing to do with its final success and that his best creations cannot be injured by his worst. Tolstoi may be ashamed of having written Anna Karenina, and may insist that his sociological tracts are superior productions, but we know better; and rejoice in his powerlessness to efface his own masterpieces. We may honestly think that we should be ashamed to put our own names to such stuff as Little Dorrit, but that does not prevent us from admiring the splendid genius that produced David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Mr. Hardy may believe that Jude the Obscure represents his zenith as a novelist, and that his poems are still greater literature; but one reading of Jude suffices, while we never tire of rereading Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native. Probably no publisher's announcement in the world to-day would cause more pleasure to English-speaking people than the announcement that Thomas Hardy was at work on a Wessex novel with characters of the familiar kind.

For The Dynasts, which covers the map of Europe, transcends the sky, and deals with world-conquerors, is not nearly so great a world-drama as A Pair of Blue Eyes, that is circumscribed in a small corner of a small island, and treats exclusively of a little group of commonplace persons. Literature deals with a constant—human nature, which is the same in Wessex as in Vienna. As the late Mr. Clyde Fitch used to say, it is not the great writers that have great things happen to them; the great things happen to the ordinary people they portray. Mr. Hardy selected a few of the southwestern counties of England as the stage for his prose dramas; to this locality he for the first time, in Far from the Madding Crowd, gave the name Wessex, a name now wholly fictitious, but which his creative imagination has made so real that it is constantly and seriously spoken of as though it were English geography. In these smiling valleys and quiet rural scenes, "while the earth keeps up her terrible composure," the farmers and milkmaids hold us spellbound as they struggle in awful passion. The author of the drama stands aloof, making no effort to guide his characters from temptation, folly, and disaster, and offering no explanation to the spectators, who are thrilled with pity and fear. But one feels that he loves and hates his children as we do, and that he correctly gauges their moral value. The very narrowness of the scene increases the intensity of the play. The rustic cackle of his bourg drowns the murmur of the world.

Mr. Hardy's knowledge of and sympathy with nature is of course obvious to all readers, but it is none the less impressive as we once more open books that we have read many times. There are incidentally few novelists who repay one so richly for repeated perusals. He seems as inexhaustible as nature herself, and he grows stale no faster than the repetition of the seasons. It is perhaps rather curious that a man who finds nature so absolutely inexorable and indifferent to human suffering should love her so well. But every man must love something greater than himself, and as Mr. Hardy had no God, he has drawn close to the world of trees, plains, and rivers. His intimacy with nature is almost uncanny. Nature is not merely a background in his stories, it is often an active agent. There are striking characters in The Return of the Native, but the greatest character in the book is Egdon Heath. The opening chapter, which gives the famous picture of the Heath, is like an overture to a great music-drama. The Heath-motif is repeated again and again in the story. It has a personality of its own, and affects the fortunes and the hearts of all human beings who dwell in its proximity. If one stands to-day on the edge of this Heath at the twilight hour, just at the moment when Darkness is conquering Light—the moment chosen by Mr. Hardy for the first chapter—one realises its significance and its possibilities. In Tess of the D'Urbervilles the intercourse between man and nature is set forth with amazing power. The different seasons act as chorus to the human tragedy. In The Woodlanders the trees seem like separate individualities. To me a tree has become a different thing since I first read this particular novel.

Even before he took up the study of architecture, Mr. Hardy's unconscious training as a novelist began. When he was a small boy, the Dorchester girls found him useful in a way that recalls the services of that reliable child, Samuel Richardson. These village maids, in their various love-affairs, which necessitated a large amount of private correspondence, employed young Hardy as amanuensis. He did not, like his great predecessor, compose their epistles; but he held the pen, and faithfully recorded the inspiration of Love, as it flowed warm from the lips of passionate youth. In this manner, the almost sexless boy was enabled to look clear-eyed into the very heart of palpitating young womanhood, and to express accurately its most gentle and most stormy emotions; just as the white voice of a choir-child repeats with precision the thrilling notes of religious passion. These early experiences were undoubtedly of the highest value in later years; indeed, as the boy grew a little older, it is probable that the impression deepened. Mr. Hardy is fond of depicting the vague, half-conscious longing of a boy to be near a beautiful woman; everyone will remember the contract between Eustacia and her youthful admirer, by which he was to hold her hand for a stipulated number of minutes. Mr. Hardy's women are full of tenderness and full of caprice; and whatever feminine readers may think of them, they are usually irresistible to the masculine mind. It has been said, indeed, that he is primarily a man's novelist, as Mrs. Ward is perhaps a woman's; he does not represent his women as marvels of intellectual splendour, or in queenly domination over the society in which they move. They are more apt to be the victims of their own affectionate hearts. One female reader, exasperated at this succession of portraits, wrote on the margin of one of Mr. Hardy's novels that she took from a circulating library, "Oh, how I hate Thomas Hardy!" This is an interesting gloss, even if we do not add meanly that it bears witness to the truth of the picture. Elfride, Bathsheba, Eustacia, Lady Constantine, Marty South, and Tess are of varied social rank and wealth; but they are all alike in humble prostration before the man they love. Mr. Hardy takes particular pleasure in representing them as swayed by sudden and constantly changing caprices; one has only to recall the charming Bathsheba Everdene, and her various attitudes toward the three men who admire her—Troy, Boldwood, and Gabriel Oak. Mr. Hardy's heroines change their minds oftener than they change their clothes; but in whatever material or mental presentment, they never lack attraction. And they all resemble their maker in one respect; at heart every one of them is a Pagan. They vary greatly in constancy and in general strength of character; but it is human passion, and not religion, that is the mainspring of their lives. He has never drawn a truly spiritual woman, like Browning's Pompilia.