SOURCE: A review of Jude the Obscure, in Thomas Hardy and His Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Reviews, edited with a commentary by Laurence Lerner and John Holmstrom, Barnes and Noble Publishers, 1968, pp. 117-22.

In the following excerpt from a review that originally appeared in Cosmopolis in January 1896, Gosse remarks favorably on characterization and plot in Jude the Obscure, calling the novel "irresistible." Gosse also notes that the Jude wanders into some improprieties, but observes that censure "is the duty of the moralist and not the critic."

[Jude the Obscure] is a study of four lives, a rectangular problem in failures, drawn with almost mathematical rigidity. The tragedy of these four persons is constructed in a mode almost as geometrical as that in which Dr. Samuel Clarke was wont to prove the existence of the Deity. It is difficult not to believe that the author set up his...