given enough weight to character tended very soon to give too much. It is true that Fielding let the balance lean a little the other way; Tom Jones and Parson Adams are sometimes rather buried under their adventures. But, as Mr. Harold Williams points out in his pleasant and readable but not at all important book, the influence of the newly discovered essay, and especially of the Spectator, had a good deal to do with guiding the lines of development to be followed by the novel; and that influence immediately put the heavier weight in the other scale. Of "Clarissa," the masterpiece of the new manner, it has often been said that the story is of no interest at all. But, in spite of Johnson, that is not true. The story is intensely interesting, but it is interesting in the new way, not in the old. The heart, mind, and soul of Clarissa are the stuff of the book: the things that happen are only its illustrations. This overpowering eighteenth century interest in character was comparatively safe in the care of a born story-teller like Richardson. With him the criticism of life and manners could not extinguish the plot altogether. But turn to two men more exactly typical of that century, men in most ways as unlike each other as possible, the typical Frenchman and the typical Englishman of the age-turn to Voltaire and Johnson, who both wrote stories which were translated into all languages-and what do we find? We find that "Candide" and "Rasselas," however unlike in other respects, are alike in the fact that in each the story is buried under a discussion of life and manners. As in the poetry of the century-Pope, Thomson, Cowper, even Wordsworth-the interest of action is quite subordinate to that of character and reflection.

The problem of the novel, then, was left for the nineteenth century to solve. The first necessity was to recover the

element of action; and that, of course, was accomplished by Scott with a splendor of life that carried him all over Europe. But Scott loved too exclusively one sort of action, the sort that can be seen, that can be painted as the pageant of life; and he took his art with too little seriousness to attempt to realize that union of the inward and the outward which is the final goal of the novel. No doubt he often triumphs almost by accident, because he is Scott, where other people strive and fail because they are themselves. But, taken as a whole, he is too irresponsible with regard to his plots, too complacent toward the old childish tradition of a mere series of exciting events arising out of nothing in particular, to satisfy perfectly the new standard which the nineteenth century was bound sooner or later to set up. He can create the Antiquary, but he cannot create a rational or probable world of action for him to move in. Only in his most perfect story can he make the whole plot turn with complete dramatic probability round the character of Jeanie Deans; and when he has done it he shows by the slipshod and vulgar fairy tale of the last chapters how little he values or understands his achievement. But while Scott out of his abundance was pouring the riches of his genius into the treasury of the novel, another writer, a young woman, was putting in two mites which, from the strict and narrow point of view of art, outvalued all his wealth. Jane Austen "never gets out of the parlor;" nothing of importance happens in her novels; nothing great is ever said in them; but all that happens and all that is said belongs strictly to the persons who are the actors in the story. "Pride and Prejudice" and "Persuasion" may or may not be great novels, but perfect novels they unquestionably are. Here, then, was the goal attained-character

and plot interacting in perfect unity. From "Emma" to "Vanity Fair" and "Middlemarch" and "The Egoist," from "Emma" even to "Madame Bovary," there is no step to be taken in artistic method, only in a larger experience of life, a higher and deeper philosophy, a greater power of emotion. Indeed in sheer artistic perfection only "Madame Bovary" can pretend to rival the story of Elizabeth Bennett. In English, with two possible exceptions, one of whom is not an Englishman, Jane Austen stands alone.

The English exception is, of course, one who is happily still living, a writer totally unlike Jane Austen in almost every respect. The authoress of "Emma" is always "genteel"; the author of "The Woodlanders" seldom tries to be and never succeeds. Jane Austen's work is delicate, exquisite, fine with a fineness more than English with something like the finesse of the French; that of Thomas Hardy is before all things large and elemental, concerned with the primary facts of life, not with the graceful handling of its details and small change. The two are as far apart as a sketch by Watteau and a cartoon by Michael Angelo. But they are also alike by an essential likeness in that they both belong to that scanty band of writers who are artists in the full sense of the word. They both possess the instinctive perception of the simplicity and directness of art, above all of art's supreme quality, perfect unity of impression. artistry of Jane Austen has always been recognized by all competent judges. In Mr. Hardy's case it is significant that the best book ever written about him is called "The Art of Thomas Hardy." Few people have better understood what is meant by art in literature than the author of that book; and so fine a critic as Lionel Johnson certainly did not choose his title without intention. What he meant

The

may be seen in the fact that after an introductory chapter he comes at once to the discussion of "Design and Composition." It is a defect in the voluminous book just written by Mr. Hedgcock that one has to travel through no less than four hundred large pages, much of them occupied with unnecessary recapitulations of Mr. Hardy's plots, before one arrives at the chapter entitled "L'Ecrivain." It is sound enough when we do get it, certainly; but it is a pity to have overweighted it by the preceding verbosity, which has made the book almost certainly the heaviest ever written about a novelist in his lifetime. Mr. Hedgcock has not Lionel Johnson's fine sense of literature or his scholarly range of illustration. Here we keep mainly to the novelists, with occasional excursions into Wordsworth and Schopenhauer; in Johnson's pages we are always meeting the greatest literature of the world and it is in the presence of the most august names that Mr. Hardy comes to take his trial. The display of reading may be a little youthful, and indeed Johnson had not long left Oxford when he wrote the book; but his learning was no academic pedantry, but the fruit of an inborn love of good literature, which, with its catholic sympathies and consciousness of a great intellectual tradition, turns what in other hands would be a mere piece of specialism into a thing full of literature and life. Mr. Hedgcock's work is a book of less distinction but it is evidently the fruit not only of great industry, but of considerable critical capacity.

Now both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Hedgcock lay stress on the fact that Mr. Hardy stands out among English novelists as an artist. Flaubert said once of "Pickwick," "Quelle composition défectuese! Tous les écrivains anglais en sont là: Walter Scott excepté, ils manquent de plan." If he

had known Hardy, he would certainly have added another exception. The instinct for art was no doubt in Mr. Hardy from the beginning. But gifts tend to take the direction that circumstances provide for them. When, therefore, we remember that at the formative period of his life Mr. Hardy was spending his working hours in an architect's office and his leisure with the Greek tragedians, we see why the note of his work has always been not grace or delicacy, but design, composition, in a word, "architectonic." This sense of proportion, in which Mr. Hardy stands supreme among novelists, is the very note of the Greek tragedians. Those great models have evidently influenced his whole method in a score of ways. No one, for instance, so nearly observes the famous unities of time and place, no one so unswervingly maintains the central unity of action, no one so relentlessly restrains his minor characters from presuming to play more than a strictly minor part. No one since Shakespeare has brought the ancient consciousness of fate so powerfully into literature. No one, again, as Mr. Hedgcock points out, has found so fine a substitute for the Greek chorus as the peasants who surround and criticise the main actors in the Wessex novels. But the main point of all is that Mr. Hardy took the drama and not the epic for his model. The novel has always wavered between the two, leaning generally to the epic, the model of "Don Quixote" and "Gil Blas" and "Tom Jones" and "Pickwick" and "Les Misérables." Scott had hesitated, influenced in details, such as his soliloquies, by the stage, but inclining too much to looseness of construction to follow the stricter model of the drama. Mr. Hardy's destiny was settled by Sophocles and the architect's office. He was certain from the first to take the drama for his model, and he has in fact produced the greatest

dramatic novels in our language.

What is the exact part he has played in the great development of the novel during the nineteenth century? What was the problem which lay before the novel when it fell, perfect but tiny, almost to the degree of insignificance, from the hands of Jane Austen? Obviously that of expansion. It had to come out of the parlor and face action and suffering, joy and sorrow, life and death. This was accomplished in different ways by the Brontë sisters, by Thackeray and Dickens, by George Eliot, by George Meredith. Certain grave issues of a particular kind were still generally avoided; but with that single exception the novel had now taken the whole of human life as its province. This, of course, increased the difficulty of the novelist's task. One great test he has to face is after all the same as that of great drama. When it is all over, do we feel that it was all inevitable? We could not anticipate the course of the action, no doubt; but when we look back do we think we perceive, as we perceive in Hamlet or Macbeth, that, given these characters and these circumstances, this, and this only, could be the issue? The great drama and the great novel are alike full of surprises, of which we feel at the end that if we had had more knowledge of human nature they would not have surprised us. As the novel takes in more and more of life it obviously becomes harder and harder to face this test. And the later novelists meet it with very unequal success. Dickens, for instance, always fails under it. Thackeray comes out of it triumphantly, at least in "Vanity Fair": Meredith in "The Egoist," but not always elsewhere, as, for instance, in "Richard Feverel": George Eliot triumphantly in "Middlemarch" and "The Mill on the Floss," almost triumphantly in "Adam Bede." In this particular line of development, then, the goal had

been reached before Mr. Hardy came. What was left for him to do? Of what he did for the architectonics of the novel, for its formal quality as a thing designed with a severe regard to proportion, enough has already been said. But great art requires greatness of content as well as perfection of design. What could Mr. Hardy bring to enrich the novel which had already entered into possession of such abundant material?

Many answers might be given, for indeed he brought many things. But the essential part of his contribution is simply poetry. He found the novel, in spite of Emily Brontë and some chapters of Meredith, a thing of prose; he has shown it how to be a thing of poetry. In contrast with the versatility and diversity of Meredith, he chose for his theme simple things, things primal and elemental, the eternal things in which poetry is most at home. His creed was not Wordsworth's, but his triumphs are won where Wordsworth's were, in the silent places where man and nature are still face to face to-day as they were a thousand years ago. We were just now saying that the goal of the novel was the union of the inward and the outward. No writer of novels has accomplished that union as Mr. Hardy has. Giles Winterbourne and Gabriel Oak are "one with Nature" in a way not to be found elsewhere. And in bringing poetry to the novel Mr. Hardy brought its sense of vastness, of universality. One may almost say that every event that occurs in great poetry has for its half-felt background the procession of the ages, the great spaces of the universe. That is just the impression left by all Mr. Hardy's finest work. He has a great deal of curious information about animals and birds, earth and water, trees and flowers, but nature for him is no assemblage of facts, but a presence and mystery. The greatest of the ac

scene on Norcombe Hill at midnight, with its panoramic glide of stars and its almost palpable roll of the world eastward, is one of many in which the reader of Mr. Hardy's novels feels himself transported beyond the heavens into the lonely spaces of the universe. And the tragic irony with which his stories are so full is largely due to the immensity of the canvas on which a few human insects are seen passionately working out their agony of an hour. Man is unthinkable alone, and Mr. Hardy always sets him in the presence not only of the cosmic but of the supernatural. He has no creed, no faith even, it seems; and yet he feels the obsession of the Divine Powers far more constantly than George Eliot, who goes half way to Christianity by her ethical fervor, or than Meredith, whose practical faith in the ascent of man carries him a long way in the same direction. For Hardy the Heavenly Powers are inscrutable. But they are always there, never to be known, but also never to be escaped; always working on man their wayward, unintelligible will.

So with the poetic imagination climbing these heights for it, the novel may perhaps have reached its utmost goal. At any rate, there are two things that may be safely said. It will not climb higher by substituting information for imagination, the method of what is called realism for that of poetry. It will lose and not gain if it forgets the lesson Mr. Hardy has himself urged upon it, that science has

nothing to do with the construction of a story and that a good work of imagination is truer than a literally exact history. To forget that is to accept the substitution of facts for truth, or, a worse substitution still, the one which, as Stevenson said, gives us cleverness instead of beauty, ugliness instead of terror, jokes instead of mirth. And there is another thing. No urgency of social or political questions can make them a satisfactory artistic substitute for the life of the human heart. No one knows that better than Mr. Hardy. For him art deals with eternal elements in humanity which are little affected by any changes in economic or political conditions. His peasants are men and women, not figures made to illustrate a social theory or promote a political reform. Great work will never come of a system which, as in Mr. Arnold Bennett's "The Card," gives us success and failure in place of joy and sorrow, or, as in Mr. Wells's "New Machiavelli," gives us mere physical attraction in place of love, political discussion in place of individual life, the outward instead of the inward, doing instead of being. The inevitably fatal note of all these books of public life is that of the superficiality of the platform. There is no real creation in them, nothing secret, nothing of that intensity of personal experience, which is at once the most individual and the most universal thing in the world. To all that again the still living master supplies the best of all correctives. To turn from a book like "The Card" or "Howard's End" to "The Woodlanders," or even to "The

The Times.

Mill on the Floss," is like turning from a photograph to a great portrait. The truth is that the doings in "Howard's End" and "The Card" are as uninteresting as the photographs in the shop windows, as like life as they are. as empty and superficial. Mr. Conrad, of course, and Mr. Masefield have given us something deeper. For though in his new novel Mr. Masefield has unfortunately lapsed into the current pamphleteering barrenness, "stocked," as J. M. Synge said of certain modern plays, "with the drugs of many seedy problems," yet in "Multitude and Solitude" he showed once for all that he could write a book big with life and poetry. But of most of our popular novelists it seems to be the melancholy truth that a whole library of them contains less of joy and sorrow, less of the will to live and of the courage to die, less sense of the great issues of human life and of the great stage on which they are decided, than may be gained from a few chapters of their great predecessors. Mr. Hedgcock thinks the novel has exhausted itself and that Mr. Hardy will close its great century of triumphs. Let us hope that may prove a premature pessimism. But if the future is to carry the development still further, it is certain that novelists must return to Mr. Hardy's methods and give us human beings instead of politicians, poetry instead of argument, the individual instead of the class, the whole of human nature, including the human heart, instead of a distorted fraction of it made up of the senses and the intellect.

CHAPTER XXV.

It was like the man, that, finding his protégée pursuing, as it seemed, for

private reasons of her own, some inexplicable line of equivocation, he should be inclined to set the incident