SOURCE: Muller, Herbert J. “The Novels of Thomas Hardy Today.” Southern Review 6, no. 1 (summer 1940): 214-24.

In the following essay, Muller argues that, despite their faults, Hardy's novels survive because of the dignity of their characters and the universality of their appeal.

In this knowing age, centennials are apt to be rather trying for the spirits of the departed. Critics come not to praise or to bury the artist but to “revalue” him; and in this performance they often treat his work primarily as a cultural symptom, a by-product of an age, an issue of deep unconscious forces—as an incidental illustration of something larger or more serious than the individualized imaginative creation that meant everything to him. The historical perspective is necessary, of course, for his sake as well as ours; it would be unfair even to Shakespeare to read his plays as if they were written by...