and compelling power, below such a masterpiece as “The Return of the Native.”  That it is on the whole a sane and wholesome work, however, may be affirmed by one who finds Hardy’s last novel “Jude the Obscure” neither.  For there is a profound difference between two such creations.  In the former, there is a piquant sense of the pathos and the awesomeness of life, but not of its unrelieved ugliness and disgust; an impression which is received from the latter.  Not only is “Jude” “a tragedy of unfulfilled aim” as the author calls it; so is “Tess”; but it fills the reader with a kind of sullen rage to be an eye-witness of the foul and brutal:  he is asked to see a drama develop beside a pig-sty.  It is therefore, intensely unesthetic which, if true, is a word of condemnation for any work of art.  It is deficient in poetry, in the broad sense; that, rather than frankness of treatment, is the trouble with it.

And intellectually, it would seem to be the result of a bad quarter of an hour of the author:  a megrim of the soul.  Elements of greatness it has; a fine motive, too; to display the impossibilities for evolution on the part of an aspiring soul hampered by circumstances and weak where most humanity is Weak, in the exercise of sex-passion.  A not dissimilar theme as it is worked out by Daudet in “Le Petite Chose” is beautiful in its pathos; in “Jude” there is something shuddering about the arbitrary piling-up of horror; the modesty of nature is overstept; it is not a truly proportioned view of life, one feels; if life were really so bad as that, no one would be willing to live it, much less exhibit the cheerfulness which is characteristic of the majority of human beings.  It is a fair guess that in the end it will be called the artistic mistake of a novelist of genius.  Its harsh reception by critics in England and America was referred to by the author privately as an example of the “crass Philistinism” of criticism in those lands:  Mr. Hardy felt that on the continent alone was the book understood, appreciated.  I imagine, however, that whatever the limitations of the Anglo-Saxon view, it comes close to the ultimate decision to be passed upon this work.

One of the striking things about these Novels is the sense that they convey of the largeness of life.  The action moves on a narrow stage set with the austere simplicity of the Elizabethans; the personages are extremely commonplace, the incidents in the main small and unexciting.  Yet the tremendousness of human fate is constantly implied and brought home in the most impressive way.  This is because all have spiritual value; if the survey be not wide, it sinks deep to the psychic center; and what matters vision that circles the globe, if it lacks grasp, penetration, uplift?  These, Hardy has.  When one calls his peasants Shaksperian, one is trying to express the strength and savor, the rich earthy quality like fresh loam that pertains to these quaint figures, so evidently observed on the ground, and lovingly lifted over into literature.  Their speech bewrays them and is an index of their slow, shrewd minds.