tendency towards didacticism is a common thing in the cases of modern writers of fiction; it spoiled a great novelist in the case of Tolstoy, with compensatory gains in another direction; of those of English stock, one thinks of Eliot, Howells, Mrs. Ward and many another.  But however natural this may be in an age like ours, the art of the literary product is, as a rule, injured by the habit of using fiction as a jumping-board for theory.  In some instances, dullness has resulted.  Eliot has not escaped scot-free.  With Hardy, he is, to my taste, never dull.  Repellent as “Jude” may be, it is never that.  But a hardness of manner and an unpleasant bias are more than likely to follow this aim, to the fiction’s detriment.

It is a great temptation to deflect from the purpose of this work in order to discuss Hardy’s short stories, for a master in this kind he is.  A sketch like “The Three Strangers” is as truly a masterpiece as Stevenson’s “A Lodging for The Night.”  It must suffice to say of his work in the tale that it enables the author to give further assurance of his power of atmospheric handling, his stippling in of a character by a few strokes, his skill in dramatic scene, his knowledge of Wessex types, and especially, his subdued but permeating pessimism.  There is nothing in his writings more quietly, deeply hopeless than most of the tales in the collection “Life’s Little Ironies.”  One shrinks away from the truth and terror of them while lured by their charm.  The short stories increase one’s admiration for the artist, but the full, more virile message conies from the Novels.  It is matter for regret that “Jude the Obscure,” unless the signs fail, is to be his last testament in fiction.  For such a man to cease from fiction at scarce sixty can but be deplored.  The remark takes on added pertinency because the novelist has essayed in lieu of fiction the poetic drama, a form in which he has less ease and authority.

Coming when he did and feeling in its full measure the tidal wave from France, Hardy was compelled both by inward and outward pressure to see life un-romantically, so far as the human fate is concerned:  but always a poet at heart (he began with verse), he found a vent for that side of his being in Nature, in great cosmic realities, in the stormy, passionate heart of humanity, so infinite in its aspirations, so doughty in its heroisms, so pathetic in its doom.  There is something noble always in the tragic largeness of Hardy’s best fiction.  His grim determinism is softened by lyric airs; and even when man is most lonesome, he is consoled by contact with “the pure, eternal course of things”; whose august flow comforts Arnold.  Because of his art, the representative character of his thought, reflecting in prose, as does Matthew Arnold in verse, the deeper thought-currents of the time; and because too of the personal quality which for lack of a better word one still must call genius, Thomas Hardy is sure to hold