spoken, for example, precisely the right word about Byron and Wordsworth. Many of us who cannot rival him, may gain from Arnold's writings a higher conception of what will be our true function if we could discharge it.' ('Studies,' ii, 92.) But Arnold had some disqualifications from which Stephen is free. Although he wrote that the critic ought to keep out of the reach of immediate practice, he was by nature didactic, and was often more interested in enforcing his own views than in explaining his author. He was, moreover, addicted to what Professor Saintsbury calls willworship, and was liable to capricious admiration. An Englishman and a lover of literature will get more pleasure from Essays in Criticism' than from Hours in a Library'; but to a foreign reader, or even to an English student, Stephen will be far more useful than Arnold, because he merges himself in his subject, and because he prefers giving information to putting out opinions.

·

Stephen, indeed, was so reluctant to decide anything without the amplest materials and the fullest thought that he constantly postpones or sets aside answers to inevitable questions. His method was, in fact, rather scientific than literary; and he neither knew nor cared much about the classical models which Arnold adopted as a standard of taste. Although he had, perhaps, as much real humour as Arnold, Bagehot, or Lowell, he was much less lavish in the display of it. With Bagehot it was deliciously irrepressible, and we are in danger of forgetting what a good critic he was in the amusement of his quaintness or delight in his personal touches. Stephen's inclination was to write about a man whom he knew as if he had never seen him: his article on Lowell in the 'Quarterly Review' (July, 1902) is a striking instance of this peculiarity. Bagehot, on the other hand, would describe a man he had never seen as if he knew him. Stephen had quite as strong personal feeling as most of his contemporaries, and stronger than many; but in criticism he strove to be judicial, to follow the evidence, and to know nothing except what was before him.

With Lowell he had more affinity than with either of the two other critics whom we have named. There was a strong mutual affection between them; and none of Stephen's addresses have more depth of sentiment or beauty of style than the words which he spoke when the

memorial to Lowell was unveiled. On the other hand, nothing could be better said or closer to the truth than a sentence in Lowell's letter to Stephen about 'English Thought in the Eighteenth Century.' 'Whatever your belief,' he wrote, 'and whatever proof you ask for believing, you show much tenderness for whatever is high-minded and sincere, even where you think it mistaken,' Lowell had a wider acquaintance than Stephen with the literature of foreign countries; and the circumstances of his life had made him a better citizen of the world. It was much the same to him whether a book was written in French or German or Italian or Spanish. He was also a sensitively patriotic American. But he was of pure English descent, and resented the suggestion that he was not an Englishman; certainly no Englishman loved English literature better, or was more thoroughly at home in it. He had the faculty, in which Stephen was somewhat lacking, of suggestiveness, of dropping a hint which excited the reader to follow it up. A great political satirist before he was otherwise known as a man of letters, Lowell had a keener interest than Stephen in public affairs; and books were not the sole or perhaps the main interest of his life. If there is in Stephen a little too much of the professional critic, there is in Lowell a little too much of the amateur. But, taken altogether, with his sanity, his lucidity, his thoroughness, his tolerance, his singular fairness of mind, Leslie Stephen is sure to rank among the best critics of his generation.

No judge who has ever sat upon the literary bench has held the moral standard higher or shown more reverence for goodness, whatever the outward form it assumed. If we may try him by the rule which he himself laid down and infer what he was from what he wrote, we may say with perfect confidence that it is impossible to rise from a perusal of his books without reverence for the fidelity of the artist and affection for the personality of the man

C

Art. VII.-THE NOVELS OF THOMAS HARDY.

Desperate Remedies (1871); Under the Greenwood Tree (1872); A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873); Far from the Madding Crowd (1874); The Hand of Ethelberta (1876); The Return of the Native (1878); The Trumpet-Major (1880); A Laodicean (1881); Two on a Tower (1882); The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); The Woodlanders (1887); Wessex Tales (1888); A Group of Noble Dames (1891); Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891); Life's Little Ironies (1894); Jude the Obscure (1895); The Wellbeloved (1897). Collected edition. Seventeen vols. London: Macmillan, 1903.

ON a review of the works of the earlier Greek poets Aristotle concluded that dramatists were able sooner to arrive at excellence in diction and characterisation than in the construction of the fable; and English literature, modern as well as ancient, is, by its main defect in narrative art, a lamentable proof of his assertion. From Spenser to Browning and George Eliot, the weak point with us has been the structure of the plot. Dramatic design, like sculpture, is an art not easily to be naturalised in this country. Ben Jonson was one of the first English writers to compose plays with all the incidents regularly interwoven and all the parts interdependent; and for this reason he was considered by some critics, from the Jacobean age to the Restoration period, to be a better dramatist than Shakespeare. Being, however, vastly inferior to several of his contemporaries in the creation and development of character and the genius for dramatic poetry, he failed to excite a general feeling for form and so establish it as a tradition binding upon later writers. Happily, the sense of literary form was, to some extent, popularised in England during the eighteenth century, when the art of painting was also founded in this country; and, on the rise of the novel, there was a possibility of the art of construction being acquired by the English mind, with the splendid examples set before it, first, by the author of 'Clarissa Harlowe,' and then by the author of 'The Bride of Lammermuir.'

Vainly, however. The loss of the sense of literary form was part of the price we had to pay for the magnificent Vol. 199.-No. 398,

2 L

results of the romantic movement. Coleridge, Hazlitt, and other critics of the romantic school, English and German, must be said to have been collaborators in innumerable badly constructed works of the last century, in that they either exalted the superstition of Shakespeare's consummate skill as a playwright into a sort of literary religion, or brought the inferior plays of other Elizabethan dramatists into fashion by dwelling on detached passages of exceptionally poetic quality and lightly passing over structural defects which should have been treated as intolerable. Owing in no small measure to the influence of these critics, our drama, in an age when great poets were attempting to write for the stage, became, in Beddoes' phrase, a haunted ruin,' and soon decayed utterly; while many volumes of fiction, remarkable and, at times, excellent in characterisation, feeling, and philosophy, remained second-rate productions in regard to proportion, compactness, correlation of parts, and general design.

Thackeray, in the first portion of Vanity Fair,' and in some later works, effected a marked improvement in the art of novel-writing in England, in construction as well as in style; but to have definitely raised the standard of workmanship in this respect is one of the fine achievements of the author of The Return of the Native.' We think it is well to insist upon this, primarily, in attempting even a brief estimate of Mr Hardy's work as a novelist. For although the best writers of the younger generation have followed him in studying conciseness, arrangement, dramatic point, and, in a few instances, purity and expressiveness of style, yet, unfortunately, the average English work remains, not only pitifully inferior to the French, but inferior also in constructive art and vividness to the average American novel of the present day. Hence, as Mr Hardy complained some sixteen years ago, in a valuable essay on the reading of fiction, probably few general readers consider that to a masterpiece in story, no less than to a masterpiece in painting or sculpture, there appertains a beauty of shape capable of giving to the trained mind an equal pleasure.

Yet, no doubt, many persons, who did not care whether or not the English novel in Mr Hardy's hands had become a well-knit drama instead of the string of episodes which

once it was, appreciated other splendid qualities in his rustic stories. First of all, he revealed to them the true romance of country life. He painted for them the woods, downs, meads, and heaths, where the Wessex labourer toiled, in a new and most impressive light. In that happy compromise between an essay in criticism and an anthology, 'Landscape in Poetry,' the late Professor Palgrave remarked in the literary treatment of natural scenery a general development. There was first a simple pleasure in describing single familiar objects; scenes were next lightly drawn as a background in the representation of human actions and manners. Then, as men gathered into cities for the business of life, and repaired to the country for pleasure and refreshment, a form of literature arose in which the loveliness and the benignity of the green earth were extolled. This idea of nature as a fair, beneficent power obtained in Wordsworth's poetry its grandest and most complete expression; and, in an era of extraordinary industrial expansion, it has become one of the commonplaces of European letters.

It implies, however, a conception of the conditions of rustic existence which is not borne out by the experiences of the peasant himself. Not by residing in a thatched cottage, amid verdant fields circled by soft blue hills, does he become a poetic figure. The poetry of his mode of life consists in his having to work for his living in a dependence on the moods of sky, air, and earth, almost as absolute as is the dependence on the moods of sky, air, and water, of mariners in a lone sailing vessel on the high seas. Dawn and darkness, rain, wind, mist, and snow, the frost in winter, the summer drought-these, for him, are personal obstructors or assistants; and every hour of the day he must study and prepare for them. He does not always see in a sunset the beauty which Turner and Shelley have taught us to appreciate; he usually glances at it for another purpose, which Mr Hardy illustrates in the scene in The Woodlanders,' where the peasant girl Marty South is planting fir trees.

6

'She looked towards the western sky, which was now aglow like some vast foundry wherein new worlds were being cast. Across it the bare boughs of a tree stretched horizontally, revealing every twig against the evening fire, and showing in