It is no exaggeration to say that for many people the publication of Tess of the D’Urbervilles was the most important event of the Nineties.

For nearly twenty years the name of Thomas Hardy had been associated with a constantly ascending literary reputation. Under the Greenwood Tree, emerging modestly in 1872, was practically unnoticed despite its merits, and the bulk of a small edition found its way to that graveyard of authors’ hopes, the threepenny tray of the second-hand bookshop. But there it chanced to meet the eye of Frederick Greenwood. Naturally attracted by its name, he bought the book, at once recognised its great merit, sought out the author, and gave him opportunities of serial publication which he would otherwise have lacked. Thus favoured, Thomas Hardy produced during the Seventies and Eighties a great mass of consistently high work. But it was not till 1891 that he won full recognition from the greater public.

There are two tests which a work of the imagination must pass before it can be called successful in the highest and best sense. It must satisfy the critical. It must appeal to the uncritical. The thing which the connoisseur alone can appreciate is often fine art; it is seldom truly great art. The thing which may momentarily capture the crowd may be pure rubbish; it is only just to say that most of the crowd are well enough aware that it is nothing more; having an appetite for anything readable they accept it on the countryman’s principle that some beer is better than other beer, but that there is no bad beer. But when the connoisseur can find no great flaw, and the crowd feels a compelling charm, we are most surely in the region of the greatest. Sometimes, as in the case of the Bible, of Gulliver, and of Hamlet, the crowd and the critics make their discoveries simultaneously; sometimes, as in the case of Pilgrim’s Progress, a book is prized by blacksmiths and cowmen long before its genius is recognised by the refined. Tess of the D’Urbervilles was an instance in the former kind. All but a few critics at once declared that it was the best achievement so far of a very fine writer; the crowd agreed (and signified the same in the usual manner) that it was a very capital story, only spoiled (from their point of view) by the extreme dismalness of its philosophy.

One of the main facts concerning Thomas Hardy is that he began life as an architect. The first work from his pen was a prize essay on “Coloured Brick and Terra Cotta Architecture,” written while he was still studying in London under Sir Arthur Blomfield. This was in 1863, when Hardy was only twenty-three years old; it was not until 1871 that he published his first novel, the very curious and interesting Desperate Remedies, and only in 1874 did he consider his prospects as a writer sufficient to justify final choice in favour of the literary calling. He had written much during his life in London, but chiefly verse. The fact, together with that of his professional training, is significant. Mr. Hardy has remained, I think, first an architect and next a poet; in all his work the first quality is power of design, and the second form and discipline in expression. His great contours are as true as the sweep of a line of classic pillars; his details have the finish of Greek statuary. In most “collected works” the one thing evident is a lack of unity, not only of manner but of essence. But in the Wessex novels the most casual reader is struck with the continuity of the inspiration. There is, of course, a change from the vernal freshness of Under the Greenwood Tree to the autumnal gloom of the pure tragedies, but the change is like that of the natural seasons; we have only different aspects of the same climatic scheme. There is an increasing sense of mastery over material as the pen grows in dexterity, but the material is chosen and disposed on principles as clearly indicated in the first of the series as in the last. It is as if Mr. Hardy had conceived his literary life much as Haussman conceived a great Paris thoroughfare, as if he had seen before him in the early Seventies a long avenue of lofty and level achievement, rising to a lordly eminence fit to display the masterpieces of his maturity. It is hard to think of another example in English of consistency so complete; in fact, it is hard to think of Hardy as of the true fellowship of English writers, though his themes are so emphatically of the English soil. He is, at bottom, more an old Greek than a modern Briton.

We have here the architect. In the finish of the details we have the poet. Those who think of the Muse as a dishevelled harridan may dispute. But those who regard the poet as bound, like any other kind of artist, to observe the conventions attaching to his medium will agree that the discipline gained in versification is observable in all Hardy’s prose. It is not that he makes ostentatious chase of the “right word.” Any word which will serve his purpose well enough he uses, just as the bricklayer does not discard a brick which happens to be a millimetre or so out of the true; such finicky fastidiousness he rightly feels is for the amateur, and not for the craftsman. But the word, like the brick, must be right enough, and there must be no question as to the way it is built into the sentence, or the way the sentence is built into the page, or the page into the chapter, or the chapter into the book. That great critic, Mr. Curdle, spoke of a “universal dove-tailedness” as the mark of the artist. I can think of no more fitting description of the perfection of Mr. Hardy’s literary joinery.

A word may be said of the material. Mr. Hardy was born near Dorchester, where he still lives, and has lived ever since he forsook London in yet early life. Anyone who called on him would find a man of very ordinary appearance in a very ordinary house. I remember one young London journalist who, greatly daring, did so call on him round about his seventieth birthday in order to discuss (with a view to subsequent publication) how it feels to be seventy and a classic. Hardy—whom Mr. H. G. Wells described as a “grey little man”—received this adventurer with a mechanical courtesy, veiling inflexible disapproval. No man can be more amiable, in conversation or correspondence, to those who have some sort of right, as Wessex compatriots or fellows of the craft, to claim his attention. But none can be more drily discouraging to impertinence. On this occasion the dry mood naturally prevailed. The visitor explained that he wanted a “story.” The author pointed to the landscape from the window, intimated that it had already afforded plenty of material for one writer, and that its capacities were still unexhausted and perhaps inexhaustible. But, when the visitor explained that he had not come down from London to write about scenery, Mr. Hardy not merely declined to be “interviewed,” he even showed (or simulated) an incapacity to understand what “interviewing” was, or how any human being could be possibly interested in the private affairs of a mere writer of books. There are, indeed, few lions so determinedly unleonine. But, in his capacity of a citizen, Mr. Hardy is by no means unsocial. Party-going has never appealed to him. But he has a quiet gift of friendship, and some sense of public obligation. He used to occupy a fairly regular seat on the county Bench, and has written pleasantly of his experiences as a Justice Silence. He has taken much interest in local performances of his own novels in dramatised form. He is a great lover of the local museum. Most, indeed, that concerns his fellow-townsmen is not altogether alien to him. He could not have written so well about Wessex if he had not been a great artist in words. But neither could he have written so well had he not been, most intensely, a Wessex man. Dorset is still, in the main, one of the least changed of English counties, and the glittering modernities of some of its seaside places only give ironic emphasis to that sense one gets of the Roman pavement on which all the later civilisations rest. It is this sense that pervades all the Wessex novels. Mr. Kipling stands for the idea of horizontal extension; we learn from him how wide a place is the world, and how tiny a place our own particular spot in the world. Mr. Hardy stands for the idea of vertical extension; he shows us that on a half-acre plot we can reach the centre of everything, provided we go deep enough. Tess is only a village girl, but the forces that made her, and will presently rend her, are older than those bones which are still dug up, in company with coins of Claudius or Hadrian, just beneath the turf of a Wessex field. The Dundee marmalade pot which she dedicates to the poor little heathen child which the curate would not bury in consecrated ground is one with the tear jugs in the Dorchester Museum. The coarse seducer is related to the Norman ancestors of Tess, who, rollicking home from a fray, dealt hard measure to some rural damsel of their day; the shame-bought parasol is brought into congruity not only with the Bournemouth esplanade but with the relics of human sacrifice which for unknown ages have caught the first beams of the sun on Salisbury Plain. There is nothing of archÆological priggishness in Mr. Hardy; but there is a deep sense of the unity of past and present, and if his novels are not crowded with living beings they hold a teeming population of ghosts. It is the speciality of a man living in a cemetery. Durdles, with his intimacy with the “old ’uns,” might have written thus if he had enjoyed a literary gift.

I believe it was Mr. Gardiner who, quoting some genius for summary classification, divided writers into “dismal coves” and “cheerful blokes.” Mr. Hardy has in certain moods a sense of the lights as well as the shadows of life: some of his earlier novels have the freshness and the open-air pleasantness of a good Morland, and, though I can never feel at home with his higher-class people, he can be fairly humorous in reproducing the talk of the poor. But in general he is not a cheerful bloke. Others have made themselves ridiculous in their resolve to secure a happy ending at all costs. Mr. Hardy is never ridiculous; he has the undeviating dignity of an undertaker’s man. But if he ever arrives at the point where a less consummate master would infallibly be ridiculous, it is always in his determination to wring our bosoms like so much washing when he might well have let us off with a slighter pang. It may, for example, have been necessary to kill poor Tess: she is marked for slaughter in the first chapter. But it was not necessary to make such dreadful sport with her. The author accuses the Immortals. But the Immortals never wrought this infamy; they might have killed her, but with a certain sense of what was due to her dignity. It was Mr. Hardy who treated her with as little respect as a gamekeeper does a stoat.

Mr. Chesterton, with the severity of the optimist, has dealt sternly with Mr. Hardy the pessimist. While George Meredith sought the lonely but healthy hills, Mr. Hardy “went botanising in the swamp”; and it was a thousand pities that the man with the healthy and manly view of life had the crabbed and perverse style, while the man with the crabbed and perverse view of life had the healthy and manly style. For Mr. Hardy, according to Mr. Chesterton, expresses in perfect English the meditations of “the village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot.” This would seem a little sweeping. Yet most readers must sometimes have been conscious of a doubt of the perfect wholesomeness of the limpid stream Mr. Hardy offers for their refreshment; its clear sparkle is reminiscent of those springs which (the scientists tell us) abound in carbonic acid gas, and (the old inhabitants hint) come from suspiciously near the place of dead men’s bones.

It is good that we should all be reminded, especially those of us who live on little islands of comfort and complacency, of the sea of misery in which so many swim desperately and ultimately founder. But is it good that we should be told, in very beautiful English, that the victims of such misery are simply the sport of the Immortals, that man struggles for ever helplessly in the grip of Fate, that this helpless struggle has been going on for all time, and that it will go on for all further time? Dickens, the unrepentant optimist, was like a jolly man in a tap-room who leads the chorus of roysterers, insists that milk-punch is the jolliest thing imaginable, snaps his finger at last week’s dun and to-morrow’s headache, and intimates that it would be folly (and even sin) to go home till morning—at any rate until justice has been done to the bitter ale and broiled bones which the thoughtful landlord has in view for the small hours. But half-way through the revel this jolly person, going outside for a moment, comes across a starving waif. He returns at once to his boon companions, makes their hearts bleed with his pathos (which is none the less roughly effective because it is a little tinged with the milk-punch), organises a “whip-round” of a few shillings each, and so does really simplify the problem of that individual waif. True, only a very insignificant impression has been made on the mass of unseen misery. But the one item of visible misery has been relieved, and (perhaps more important) a disposition has been created on a number of not unpleasant people to recognise and relieve misery when they see it.

But Mr. Hardy, the pessimist, his beautiful style never vulgarised and his fine intellect never flustered by milk-punch, has no such effect. He deftly exhibits his samples of hell, intimates that there is a quite unlimited stock fully up to specification, and rather hopes that he will be able to show you something even more striking by the opening of the spring season. Tess is not bad. But “Jude the Obscure” has also his points; in fact, the wholesale house for which we travel is not to be surpassed for variety and quality of misery. Somebody accused Carlyle (I think) of bringing a load of woe to one’s doorstep and leaving it there. Mr. Hardy does not exactly leave it. He is far more thoughtful than that. He rings the bell, explains with perfect charm and lucidity every item in the pack of trouble, and carefully explains to the householder that, however mean he may feel, it is no good his trying to do anything. That highly human (and not undesirable) instinct of Mr. Snagsby to try on all occasions what a half-crown will do is frozen by a sense not only of helplessness but almost of impiety. Is not one even a presumptuous worm to think of opposing a miserable thirty pence to the implacable operation of Circumstance?

Mr. Hardy’s depression steadily grows as he gets older. There is, it is true, much bitterness in his more youthful poems. But it is the sort of bitterness that goes with clever youth. A somewhat more buoyant note distinguishes the work of his early manhood; but with middle age the shadows deepen, and a deep and almost unrelieved sadness broods over all. It would be untrue to say that Mr. Hardy has no humour; is there no humour in that question of the rustic, in defending the ways of Providence, “D’ye think the man’s a fool?” But it is scarcely untrue to say that Mr. Hardy’s humour is commonly as depressing as his gloom; it has much the same mournful effect as those infrequent flashes of the comic spirit which emphasise the determined dismalness of Mr. Galsworthy. Mr. Hardy’s humour has nothing sunny in it; it is rather like the arc-light which, on a frosty night, makes us see the cold as well as feel it. One can hardly recall another great English novelist who has no hearty, genial, enjoying laugh in him. But one can find many foreign counterparts to Mr. Hardy, ancient and modern; if he seems colder than they, it is only a question of climate. It is often chilly round the Mediterranean, but one can do without a fire; in England one wants, if not the grateful open blaze, at least some efficient system of central heating. Reading much Hardy has the effect of sitting in a beautifully furnished room on a February day without a fire; but the simile is not quite exact—there should be all the elements of the fire, except the heat.

Possibly it is in the very gentleness of Mr. Hardy that we may look for the secret of this pessimism. His detestation of any form of cruelty may have embittered his indictment of the cruelty of Fate. In one of his books he dwells for a moment on the pain of a wounded pheasant, and turns away with an imprecation against its wounders. But there would be no pheasants without shooters, and most pheasants live happily and die painlessly. Equally are Tess and Jude the exceptions. It is the defect—and even the artistic defect—of Mr. Hardy that he manages to convey the impression that they are the rule.