To name another quality that gives distinction to Hardy’s work:  his fiction is notably well-built, and he is a resourceful technician.  Often, the way he seizes a plot and gives it proportionate progress to an end that is inevitable, exhibits a well-nigh perfect art.  Hardy’s novels, for architectural excellence, are really wonderful and will richly repay careful study in this respect.  It has been suggested that because his original profession was that of an architect, his constructive ability may have been carried over to another craft.  This may be fantastic; but the fact remains that for the handling of material in such a manner as to eliminate the unnecessary, and move steadily toward the climax, while ever imitating though not reproducing, the unartificial gait of life, Hardy has no superior in English fiction and very few beyond it.  These ameliorations of humor and pity, these virtues of style and architectural handling make the reading of Thomas Hardy a literary experience, and very far from an undiluted course in Pessimism.  A sane, vigorous, masculine mind is at work in all his fiction up to its very latest.  Yet it were idle to deny the main trend of his teaching.  It will be well to trace with some care the change which has crept gradually over his view of the world.  As his development of thought is studied in the successive novels he produced between 1871 and 1898, it may appear that there is little fundamental change in outlook:  the tragic note, and the dark theory of existence, explicit in “Tess” and “Jude,” is more or less implicit in “Desperate Remedies.”  But change there is, to be found in the deepening of the feeling, the pushing of a theory to its logical extreme.  This opening tale, read in the light of what he was to do, strikes one as un-Hardy-like in its rather complex plot, with its melodramatic tinge of incident.

The second book, “Under the Greenwood Tree,” is a blithe, bright woodland comedy and it would have been convenient for a cut-and-dried theory of Hardy’s growth from lightness to gravity, had it come first.  It is, rather, a happy interlude, hardly representative of his main interest, save for its clear-cut characterizations of country life and its idyllic flavor.  The novel that trod on its heels, “A Pair of Blue Eyes,” maugre its innocently Delia Cruscan title,—­it sounds like a typical effort of “The Duchess,”—­has the tragic end which light-minded readers have come to dread in this author.  He showed his hand thus comparatively early and henceforth was to have the courage of his convictions in depicting human fate as he saw it—­not as the reader wished it.