I have noticed that if I buy a book because I am advised, or because I think I ought, my reading is sure to prove sterile. Il faut que cela, vient de moi, as a woman once said to me, speaking of her caprices; a quotation, a chance word heard in an unexpected quarter.  Mr. Hardy and Mr. Blackmore I read because I had heard that they were distinguished novelists; neither touched me, I might just as well have bought a daily paper; neither like nor dislike, a shrug of the shoulders—­that is all.  Hardy seems to me to bear about the same relation to George Eliot as Jules Breton does to Millet—­a vulgarisation never offensive, and executed with ability.  The story of an art is always the same,... a succession of abortive but ever strengthening efforts, a moment of supreme concentration, a succession of efforts weakening the final extinction.  George Eliot gathered up all previous attempts, and created the English peasant; and following her peasants there came an endless crowd from Devon, Yorkshire, and the Midland Counties, and, as they came, they faded into the palest shadows until at last they appeared in red stockings, high heels and were lost in the chorus of opera.  Mr. Hardy was the first step down.  His work is what dramatic critics would call good, honest, straightforward work.  It is unillumined by a ray of genius, it is slow and somewhat sodden.  It reminds me of an excellent family coach—­one of the old sort hung on C springs—­a fat coachman on the box and a footman whose livery was made for his predecessor.  In criticising Mr. Meredith I was out of sympathy with my author, ill at ease, angry, puzzled; but with Mr. Hardy I am on quite different terms, I am as familiar with him as with the old pair of trousers I put on when I sit down to write; I know all about his aims, his methods; I know what has been done in that line, and what can be done.

I have heard that Mr. Hardy is country bred, but I should not have discovered this from his writings.  They read to me more like a report, yes, a report,—­a conscientious, well-done report, executed by a thoroughly efficient writer sent down by one of the daily papers.  Nowhere do I find selection, everything is reported, dialogues and descriptions.  Take for instance the long evening talk between the farm people when Oak is seeking employment.  It is not the absolute and literal transcript from nature after the manner of Henri Monier; for that it is a little too diluted with Mr. Hardy’s brains, the edges are a little sharpened and pointed, I can see where the author has been at work filing; on the other hand, it is not synthesized—­the magical word which reveals the past, and through which we divine the future—­is not seized and set triumphantly as it is in “Silas Marner.”  The descriptions do not flow out of and form part of the narrative, but are wedged in, and often awkwardly.  We are invited to assist at a sheep-shearing scene, or at a harvest supper, because these scenes are not to be found in the works of George Eliot, because the reader is supposed to be interested in such things, because Mr. Hardy is anxious to show how jolly country he is.