HARDY.  Thomas Hardy (1840-) seems, like Meredith, to belong to the present rather than to a past age, and an interesting comparison may be drawn between these two novelists.  In style, Meredith is obscure and difficult, while Hardy is direct and simple, aiming at realism in all things.  Meredith makes man the most important phenomenon in the universe; and the struggles of men are brightened by the hope of victory.  Hardy makes man an insignificant part of the world, struggling against powers greater than himself,—­sometimes against systems which he cannot reach or influence, sometimes against a kind of grim world-spirit who delights in making human affairs go wrong.  He is, therefore, hardly a realist, but rather a man blinded by pessimism; and his novels, though generally powerful and sometimes fascinating, are not pleasant or wholesome reading.  From the reader’s view point some of his earlier works, like the idyllic love story Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), are the most interesting.  Hardy became noted, however, when he published Far from the Madding Crowd, a book which, when it appeared anonymously in the Cornhill Magazine (1874), was generally attributed to George Eliot, for the simple reason that no other novelist was supposed to be capable of writing it. The Return of the Native (1878) and The Woodlanders are generally regarded as Hardy’s masterpieces; but two novels of our own day, Tess of the D’Ubervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), are better expressions of Hardy’s literary art and of his gloomy philosophy.

STEVENSON.  In pleasing contrast with Hardy is Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), a brave, cheery, wholesome spirit, who has made us all braver and cheerier by what he has written.  Aside from their intrinsic value, Stevenson’s novels are interesting in this respect,—­that they mark a return to the pure romanticism of Walter Scott.  The novel of the nineteenth century had, as we have shown, a very definite purpose.  It aimed not only to represent life but to correct it, and to offer a solution to pressing moral and social problems.  At the end of the century Hardy’s gloom in the face of modern social conditions became oppressive, and Stevenson broke away from it into that land of delightful romance in which youth finds an answer to all its questions.  Problems differ, but youth is ever the same, and therefore Stevenson will probably be regarded by future generations as one of our most enduring writers.  To his life, with its “heroically happy” struggle, first against poverty, then against physical illness, it is impossible to do justice in a short article.  Even a longer biography is inadequate, for Stevenson’s spirit, not the incidents of his life, is the important thing; and the spirit has no biographer.  Though he had written much better work earlier, he first gained fame by his Treasure Island (1883), an absorbing story of pirates and of a hunt for buried