In considering the books that subsequently appeared, to strengthen Hardy’s place with those who know fine fiction, they are seen to have his genuine hall-mark, just in proportion as they are Wessex through and through:  in the interplay of character and environment there, we get his deepest expression as artist and interpreter.  The really great novels are “Far From the Madding Crowd,” “The Return of the Native,” “The Mayor of Casterbridge” and “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”:  when he shifts the scene to London, as in “The Hand of Ethelberta” or introduces sophisticated types as in the dull “Laodicean,” it means comparative failure.  Mother soil (he is by birth a Dorchester man and lives there still) gives him idiosyncrasy, flavor, strength.  That the best, most representative work of Hardy is to be seen in two novels of his middle career, “Far From the Madding Crowd” and “The Return of the Native” rather than in the later stories, “Tess” and “Jude,” can be established, I think, purely on the ground of art, without dragging cheap charges of immorality into the discussion.  In the last analysis, questions of art always become a question of ethics:  the separation is arbitrary and unnatural.  That “Tess” is the book into which the author has most intensely put his mature belief, may be true:  it is quiveringly alive, vital as only that is which comes from the deeps of a man’s being.  But Hardy is so much a special pleader for Tess, that the argument suffers and a grave fault is apparent when the story’s climax is studied.  There is an intrusion of what seems like factitious melodrama instead of that tissue of events which one expects from a stern necessitarian.  Tess need not be a murderess; therefore, the work should not so conclude, for this is an author whose merit is that his effects of character are causal.  He is fatalistic, yes; but in general he royally disdains the cheap tricks of plot whereby excitement is furnished at the expense of credulity and verisimilitude.  In Tess’s end, there s a suspicion of sensation for its own sake—­a suggestion of savage joy in shocking sensibilities.  Of course, the result is most powerful; but the superior power of the novel is not here so much as in its splendid sympathy and truth.  He has made this woman’s life-history deeply affecting and is right in claiming that she is a pure soul, judged by intention.

The heart feels that she is sinned against rather than sinning and in the spectacle of her fall finds food for thought “too deep for tears.”  At the same time, it should not be forgotten that Tess’s piteous plight,—­the fact that fate has proved too strong for a soul so high in its capacity for unselfish and noble love,—­is based upon Hardy’s assumption that she could not help it.  Here, as elsewhere in his philosophy, you must accept his premise, or call Tess (whom you may still love) morally weak.  It is this reservation which will lead many to place the book, as a work of art, and notwithstanding its noble proportions