Thomas Hardy is a realist in a sense true of no English novelist of anything like equal rank preceding him:  his literary genealogy is French, for his “Jude The Obscure” has no English prototype, except the earlier work of George Moore, whose inspiration is even more definitely Paris.  To study Hardy’s development for a period of about twenty-five years from “Under the Greenwood Tree” to “Jude,” is to review, as they are expressed in the work of one great English novelist, the literary ideals before and after Zola.  Few will cavil at the inclusion in our study of a living author like Hardy.  His work ranks with the most influential of our time; so much may be seen already.  His writing of fiction, moreover, or at least of Novels, seems to be finished.  And like Meredith, he is a man of genius and, strictly speaking, a finer artist than the elder author.  For quality, then, and significance of accomplishment, Hardy may well be examined with the masters whose record is rounded out by death.  He offers a fine example of the logic of modern realism, as it has been applied by a first-class mind to the art of fiction.  In Meredith, on the contrary, is shown a sort of synthesis of the realistic and poetic-philosophic interpretation.  Hardy is for this reason easier to understand and explain; Meredith refuses classification.

The elements of strength in Thomas Hardy can be made out clearly; they are not elusive.  Wisely, he has chosen to do a very definite thing and, with rare perseverance and skill, he has done it.  He selected as setting the south-western part of England—­Wessex, is the ancient name he gave it—­that embraces Somersetshire and contiguous counties, because he felt that the types of humanity and the view of life he wished to show could best be thrown out against the primitive background.  Certain elemental truths about men and women, he believed, lost sight of in the kaleidoscopic attritions of the town, might there be clearly seen.  The choice of locale was thus part of an attitude toward life.  That attitude or view may be described fairly well as one of philosophic fatalism.

It has not the cold removedness of the stoic:  it has pity in it, even love.  But it is deeply sad, sometimes bitter.  In Hardy’s presentation of Nature (a remark applying to some extent to a younger novelist who shows his influence, Phillpotts), she is displayed as an ironic expression, with even malignant moods, of a supreme cosmic indifference to the petty fate of that animalcule, man.  And this, in spite of a curious power she possesses of consoling him and of charming him by blandishments that cheat the loneliness of his soul.  There is no purer example of tragedy in modern literature than Mr. Hardy’s strongest, most mature stories.  A mind deeply serious and honest, interprets the human case in this wise and conceives that the underlying pitilessness can most graphically be conveyed in a setting like that of Egdon Heath, where the great silent forces of Nature somberly interblend with the forces set in motion by the human will, both futile to produce happiness.  Even the attempt to be virtuous fails in “Jude”:  as the attempt to be happy does in “Tess.”  That sardonic, final thought in the last-named book will not out of our ears:  Fate had played its last little jest with poor Tess.