But there are mitigations, many and welcome.  Hardy has the most delightful humor.  His peasants and simple middle-class folk are as distinctive and enjoyable as anything since Shakspere.  He also has a more sophisticated, cutting humor—­tipped with irony and tart to the taste—­which he uses in those stories or scenes where urbanites mingle with his country folk.  But his humorous triumphs are bucolic.  And for another source of keenest pleasure, there is his style, ennobling all his work.  Whether for the plastic manipulation of dialogue or the eloquencies and exactitudes of description, he is emphatically a master.  His mind, pagan in its bent, is splendidly broad in its comprehension of the arcana of Nature and that of a poet sensitive to all the witchery of a world which at core is inscrutably dark and mysterious.  He knows, none better, of the comfort to be got even from the sad when its beauty is made palpitating.  No one before him, not Meredith himself, has so interfused Nature with man as to bring out the thought of man’s ancient origin in the earth, his birth-ties, and her claims on his allegiance.  This gives a rare savor to his handling of what with most novelists is often mere background.  Egdon Heath was mentioned; the setting in “The Return of the Native” is not background in the usual sense; that mighty stretch of moorland is almost like the central actor of the drama, so potent is its influence upon the fate of the other characters.  So with “The Woodlanders” and still other stories.  Take away this subtle and vital relation of man to Nature, and the whole organism collapses.  Environment with Hardy is atmosphere, influence, often fate itself.  Being a scientist in the cast of his intellect, although by temperament a poet, he believes in environment as the shaping power conceived of by Taine and Zola.  It is this use of Nature as a power upon people of deep, strong, simple character, showing the sweep of forces far more potent than the conventions of the polite world, which distinguishes Hardy’s fiction.  Fate with him being so largely that impersonal thing, environment; allied with temperament (for which he is not responsible), and with opportunity—­another element of luck—­it follows logically that man is the sport of the gods.  Hardy is unable, like other determinists, to escape the dilemma of free-will versus predestination, and that other crux, the imputation of personality to the workings of so-called natural laws.  Indeed curiously, in his gigantic poem-cycle, “the Dynasts,” the culmination of his life-work, he seems to hint at a plan of the universe which may be beneficial.