chair suddenly from under an old woman.  Now, by wedding Necessity with uncouth Jocularity, Mr. Hardy may have found an hypothesis that solves for him all the difficulties of life.  I am not concerned in this place to deny that it may be the true explanation.  I have merely to point out that art and criticism must take some time in getting accustomed to it, and that meanwhile the traditions of both are so far agreed in allowing a certain amount of free will to direct the actions of men and women that a tale which should be all necessity and no free will would, in effect, be necessity’s own contrary—­a merely wanton freak.

For, in effect, it comes to this:—­The story of Tess, in which attention is so urgently directed to the hand of Destiny, is not felt to be inevitable, but freakish.  The story of Esther Waters, in which a poor servant-girl is allowed to grapple with her destiny and, after a fashion, to defeat it, is felt (or has been felt by one reader, at any rate) to be absolutely inevitable.  To reconcile us to the black flag above Wintoncester prison as to the appointed end of Tess’s career, a curse at least as deep as that of Pelops should have been laid on the D’Urberville family.  Tess’s curse does not lie by nature on all women; nor on all Dorset women; nor on all Dorset women who have illegitimate children; for a very few even of these are hanged.  We feel that we are not concerned with a type, but with an individual case deliberately chosen by the author; and no amount of talk about the “President of the Immortals” and his “Sport” can persuade us to the contrary.  With Esther Waters, on the other hand, we feel we are assisting in the combat of a human life against its natural destiny; we perceive that the woman has a chance of winning; we are happy when she wins; and we are the better for helping her with our sympathy in the struggle.  That is why, using the word in the Aristotelian sense, I maintain that Esther Waters is a more “philosophical” work than Tess.

The atmosphere of the low-class gambling in which Mr. Moore’s characters breathe and live is no doubt a result of his careful study of Zola.  It is, as everyone knows, M. Zola’s habit to take one of the many pursuits of men—­from War and Religion down to Haberdashery and Veterinary Surgery—­and expand it into an atmosphere for a novel.  But in Mr. Moore’s case it may safely be urged that gambling on racehorses actually is the atmosphere in which a million or two of Londoners pass their lives.  Their hopes, their very chances of a satisfying meal, hang from day to day on the performances of horses they have never seen.  I cannot profess to judge with what accuracy Mr. Moore has reproduced the niceties of handicapping, bookmaking, place-betting, and the rest, the fluctuations of the gambling market, and their causes.  I gather that extraordinary care has been bestowed upon these details; but criticism here must be left to experts, I only know that, not once or twice only in the course of his narrative, Mr. Moore makes us study the odds against a horse almost as eagerly as if it carried our own money:  because it does indeed carry for a while the destiny of Esther Waters—­and yet for a while only.  We feel that, whichever horse wins the ultimate issues are inevitable.