Nor is his serious characterization less fine and representative than his humorous; especially his women.  It is puzzling to say whether Hardy’s comic men, or his subtly drawn, sympathetically visualized women are to be named first in his praise:  for power in both, and for the handling of nature, he will be long remembered.  Bathsheba, Eustacia, Tess and the rest, they take hold on the very heart-strings and are known as we know our very own.  It is not that they are good or bad,—­generally they are both; it is that they are beautifully, terribly human.  They mostly lack the pettiness that so often fatally limits their sex and quite as much, they lack the veneer that obscures the broad lines of character.  And it is natural to add, while thinking of Hardy’s women, that, unlike almost all the Victorian novelists, he has insisted frankly, but in the main without offense, on woman’s involvement with sex-passion; he finds that love, in a Wessex setting, has wider range than has been awarded it in previous study of sex relations.  And he has not hesitated to depict its rootage in the flesh; not overlooking its rise in the spirit to noblest heights.  And it is this un-Anglo-Saxon-like comprehension of feminine humanity that makes him so fair to the sinning woman who trusts to her ruin or proves what is called weak because of the generous movement of her blood.  No one can despise faithful-hearted Fannie Robin, dragging herself to the poorhouse along Casterbridge highway; that scene, which bites itself upon the memory, is fairly bathed in an immense, understanding pity.  Although Hardy has thus used the freedom of France in treatment, he has, unlike so much of the Gallic realism, remained an idealist in never denying the soul of love while speaking more truthfully concerning its body than the fiction-makers before him.  There is no finer handling of sex-love with due regard to its dual nature,—­love that grows in earth yet flowers until it looks into heaven—­than Marty’s oft-quoted beautiful speech at her lover’s grave; and Hardy’s belief rings again in the defense of that good fellowship—­that camaraderie—­which can grow into “the only love which is as strong as death—­beside which the passion usually so-called by the name is evanescent as steam.”  A glimpse like that of Hardy’s mind separates him at once from Maupassant’s view of the world.  The traditions of English fiction, which he has insisted on disturbing, have, after all, been strong to direct his work, as they have that of all the writers born into the speech and nourished on its racial ideals.

Another reason for giving the stories of the middle period, such as “The Return of the Native,” preference over those that are later, lies in the fact that the former have no definite, aggressive theme; whereas “Tess” announces an intention on the title page, “Jude,” in a foreword.  Whatever view of life may be expressed in “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” for example, is imbedded, as it should be, in the course of the story.  This