Life.—­The subtle, comic aspects of cosmopolitan life, which were such a fascination to Meredith, did not appeal to that somber realist, Thomas Hardy, whose genius enabled him to paint impressive pictures of the retired elemental life of Wessex.  Hardy was born in 1840 in the little village of Bockhampton, Dorsetshire, a few miles out of Dorchester.  He received his early education at the local schools, attended evening classes at King’s College, London, and studied Gothic architecture under Sir Arthur Blomfield.  The boy was articled at the early age of sixteen to an ecclesiastical architect and, like the hero in his novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, made drawings and measurements of old churches in rural England and planned their remodeling.  He won medals and prizes in this profession before he turned from it to authorship.  His first published work, How I Built Myself a House, was an outgrowth of some early experiences as an architect.

Hardy married Miss Emma Lavinia Gifford in 1874 and went to live at Sturminster Newton.  Later he spent some time in London; but he returned finally to his birthplace, the land of his novels, and built himself a home at Max Gate, Dorchester, in 1885.  His life has been a retired one.  He always shunned publicity, but he was happy to receive in 1910 the freedom of his native town, an honor bestowed upon him as a mark of love and pride.

Works.—­Thomas Hardy is one of the greatest realists in modern England, and also one of the most uncompromising pessimists.  His characters are developed with consummate skill, but usually their progression is toward failure or death.  These men and women are largely rustics who subsist by means of humble toil, such as tending sheep or cutting furze.  The orbit of their lives is narrow.  The people are simple, primitive, superstitious.  They are only half articulate in the expression of their emotions.  In Far From the Madding Crowd, for example, Gabriel Oak wished to have Bathsheba know “his impressions; but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odor in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feelings in the coarse meshes of language.  So he remained silent.”  On the other hand, the speech is sometimes racy, witty, and flavored by the daily occupation of the speaker.

The scenes usually selected for Hardy’s stories are from his own county and those immediately adjacent, to which section of country he has given the name of Wessex.  He knows it so intimately and paints it so vividly that its moors, barrows, and villages are as much a part of the stories as the people dwelling there.  In fact, Egdon Heath has been called the principal character in the novel, The Return of the Native (1878).  The upland with its shepherd’s hut, the sheep-shearing barn, the harvest storm, the hollow of ferns, and the churchyard with its dripping water spout are part of the wonderful landscape in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) This is the