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the Athenæum and the Spectator 'We see no reason why he should not write novels only a little inferior to the best of the present generation.' In 1872 the charming idyl Under the Greenwood Tree appeared, and was recognised as a singularly fresh and delightful sketch of rural life, comparable with the masterpieces of George Sand. It describes the love affairs of a country schoolmistress, 'a bright little bird,' with the vicar, the churchwarden, and the tranter's son, who wins the prize. It was followed in 1873 by A Pair of Blue Eyes, a tragedy wrought out with much subtlety and pathos. Its irony prevented it from being very popular, though the heroine is one of the most winning among the author's creations. Mr Hardy gained his first notable success with his next book, Far from the Madding Crowd, first published in the Cornhill Magazine, under the editorship of Mr Frederick Greenwood. Appearing anonymously, it was attributed by many readers to George Eliot, though some of the younger critics of the day did not hesitate to deny this on the ground that the story was much too good for her. From that day Mr Hardy had his own circle of warm admirers, both among reviewers and readers. In Far from the Madding Crowd there is a sure and easy power, a wealth of material, an unfailing distinction of expression, and a dramatic power which places the book among the author's finest productions. The Hand of Ethelberta, which followed in 1876, is a very clever and brilliant exercise in comedy. The heroine, Ethelberta, is a butler's daughter, who finds herself placed by marriage in an aristocratic environment, and the tale describes the reactions between her and her circumstances. Next came The Return of the Native, perhaps the greatest and most original of all Mr Hardy's books, the most masterly in style, and the profoundest in its apprehension of nature and character. somewhat coldly received, but has steadily grown in favour. Then came The Trumpet-Major, a slighter and more popular book, on the lines of Far from the Madding Crowd. It was succeeded by A Laodicean and Two on a Tower, both highly finished works, but neither marking an advance. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is a sound and strong study of human nature, and The Woodlanders (1887) is a book of more complex and still greater power, ranking with Far from the Madding Crowd and the Return of the Native. Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) was the first story of Mr Hardy's that had a really great circulation, and in some respects it marked a new departure in his work. There was no change in the underlying convictions and preferences to which he has been constant from the beginning, but he asserted his right to deal more frankly and explicitly with the "problems of life and destiny. This claim was pushed still further in Jude the Obscure (1895), which called forth much hostile criticism. It is certain that Tess and Jude are in every respect among the highest achievements of the author,

It was

whatever be thought of their philosophy. By the time they were published, comparisons between Mr Hardy and the popular novelists who reigned over the dreariest period of British fiction were felt to be ridiculous. In 1897 The Well-beloved, published some years previously in serial form, appeared as a book. Wessex Tales (1888) contains some of the best short stories in the language, and A Group of Noble Dames (1891) embodies in fiction some Wessex traditions. Two volumes of poetry, Wessex Poems (1898) and Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), are characteristic expressions of the author's mind, rugged and sombre, but often with a haunting melody of their own.

Mr Hardy is first of all a most original writer. He is influenced by no master, although it is easy to see that Heine and Schopenhauer have touched him. As a stylist he occupies a high place, though he has cared supremely for rendering the truth as he has seen it in fact and life. He is born of the earth, born of Wessex almost in a more special sense than her other children. His Teniers-like power of catching and fixing phases of peasant life is unapproached except in Shakespeare. At their best his peasants are comparable only with those in Hamlet and A Winter's Tale. It has been complained that he brings the phrases and thoughts of culture into the conversation of his rustics, intertwining distinct phases of either thought or language, or of both. It may be replied that the humours of his peasantry are bound up largely with their use of scriptural language; but the true answer is that such creations of genius attest themselves like Shakespeare's. His sensitiveness to scenic and atmospheric effects; to the moods and changes of day and night; to the voices of the heathbells, the trees, and the winds; to the delicate harmonies of colour, achieves an effect impossible to the closest observation and the minutest vision. It brings the reader into the inmost heart and shrine of nature. In Mr Hardy's view of life the main interest is that of love. has hardly any place for children. His heroes and heroines are isolated. Family ties count for little. The ordinary ambition for a career is scarcely recognised. In his characters the element of flexibility is wanting, and when the phase of passionate love is ended there is little to follow but misery. His women have been described as 'Undines of the earth.' They are fascinating, vivacious, incalculable. They have an elemental purity of nature, and so long as they are led by instinct they are true, but they make no fight against circumstances. They show an impassioned receptivity, and their love is blind and impulsive. From the first, but more explicitly in his later books, Mr Hardy has proclaimed that human life is governed by inscrutable forces; that human beings are puppets of fate, and destined to misery. From an artistic point of view, it is difficult to secure the full effect of tragedy in a book where tragedy itself is treated as hardly more than a deeper tinge

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of the common leaden colour in the human lot, and it might be fair to say that in the Return of the Native the final impression is rather that of human miserableness than of human grief. But this cannot be said of Tess and Jude the Obscure. There we have a true rendering of the anguish of the human spirit, of the depths, though not of the heights, in life.

From The Return of the Native.'

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through

THOMAS HARDY. From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry.

the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis-the final overthrow.

It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of flowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious only with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than the present. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications which frequently invest the façade of a prison with far more dignity than is found in the façade of a palace double its size lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas, if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings over

sadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.

Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule: human souls may find themselves in closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it is young. The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind, and, ultimately, to the commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards and myrtle-gardens of South Europe are to him now; and Heidelberg and Baden be passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to the sand-dunes of Scheveningen.

It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature-neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly: neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face,

suggesting tragical possibilities.

[graphic]

Valenciennes.

(1793-)

We trenched, we trumpeted and drummed, And from our mortars tons of iron hummed Ath'art the ditch, the month we bombed The Town o' Valencieën.

'Twas in the June o' Ninety-dree

(The Duke o' Yark our then Commander been) The German Legion, Guards, and we

Laid siege to Valencieën.

This was the first time in the war

That French and English spilled each other's gore;

-God knows what year will end the roar

Begun at Valencieën!

'Twas said that we'd no business there A-topperèn the French for disagreën; However, that's not my affairWe were at Valencieën.

Such snocks and slats, since war began
Never knew raw recruit or veteran :
Stone-deaf therence went many a man
Who served at Valencieën.

Into the streets, ath'art the sky,

A hundred thousand balls and bombs were fleën;
And harmless townsfolk fell to die
Each hour at Valencieën!

And, sweatèn wi' the bombardiers,

A shell was slent to shards anighst my ears:
-'Twas nigh the end of hopes and fears
For me at Valencieën!

They bore my wownded frame to camp, And shut my gapèn skull, and washed en clean, And jined en wi' a zilver clamp

Thik night at Valencieën.

'We've fetched en back too quick from dead;
But never more on earth while rose is red
Will drum rouse Corpel!' Doctor said
O' me at Valencieën.

'Twer true. No voice o' friend or foe
Can reach me now, or any livèn beën;
And little have I power to know
Since then at Valencieën!

I never hear the zummer hums

O' bees; and don' know when the cuckoo comes; But night and day I hear the bombs

We threw at Valencieën. . .

As for the Duke o' Yark in war,

There be some volk whose judgment o' en is mean;
But this I say 'a was not far

From great at Valencieën.

O' wild wet nights, when all seems sad,

My wownds come back, as though new wownds I'd had;

But yet at times I'm sort o' glad

I fout at Valencieën.

Well: Heaven wi' its jasper halls

Is now the on'y Town I care to be in. . . . Good Lord, if Nick should bomb the walls As we did Valencieën!

1878-1897.

One of the best criticisms is in the Westminster Review, April 1883; another is that by Coventry Patmore in the St James's Gazette, and April 1887. See also volumes by Lionel Johnson (1894) and Annie Macdonell (1894). The Hardy country has been described and illustrated by Bertram Windle. See also Bookman, November 1901. W. ROBERTSON NICOLL.

Alfred Austin, poet-laureate from 1896 onwards, was born of Catholic parents at Headingley, Leeds, in 1835; and, educated at Stonyhurst and Oscott, he graduated at the University of London in 1853, and was called to the Bar in 1857, but practised for little more than three years, having on his father's death in 1861 adopted literature as a profession. His first efforts in poetry and fiction (Randolph, a Tale of Polish Grief, &c.) had hardly been successful; but The Season, a Satire (1861), was distinctly bright and clever. In The Poetry of the Period (1870) he distinguished himself more by the audacity of his judgments on Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and Swinburne than by real critical insight. The Golden Age, Interludes, Madonna's Child, The Tower of Babel ('a celestial love drama'), The Human Tragedy, Lyrical Poems, and Narrative Poems (vol. vi. of a collected edition of his works) are volumes of verse in various kinds, as are Savonarola (a tragedy), Prince Lucifer (a drama in verse), England's Darling, The Conversion of Winckelmann and other Poems, and Flodden Field, performed at His Majesty's Theatre in 1903; and we have further had from him the idyllic prose books The Garden that I Love, In Veronica's Garden, and Lamia's Winter Quarters, not to speak of Spring and Autumn in Ireland and A Tale of True Love. From 1883 Mr Austin had been the energetic editor of the National Review; and in 1896 (four

[merged small][graphic]

ALFRED AUSTIN.

From a Photograph by Russell & Sons.

Sir Alfred Comyns Lyall was born, the son of a clergyman, at Coulston in Surrey in 1835, and was educated at Eton and Haileybury for an Indian career. K.C.B. (1881) and Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces in 1882-87, he was in 1888 appointed a member of the Council of India. His Verses written in India proved him to be not merely a keen critic of the life about him but a poet. His Asiatic Studies (1882; new ed. 1899) showed a rarely sympathetic insight into the actual beliefs of the Indian people, and has been heartily accepted as a standard authority. He has also written a book on Warren Hastings, and one on the rise of the British dominion in India (1893); and, in a different field, a critical study of Tennyson (1902). He is a member of the Privy Council and holds honorary degrees of Oxford and Cambridge.

Alfred Ainger, son of a London architect, was born in 1837, graduated from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and after holding a cure near Lichfield, in 1866 became a reader at the Temple Church, in 1887 a canon of Bristol, and in 1894 Master of

the Temple. Author of the articles on Lamb and Hood in this work; of selections, with a memoir, from Hood; and of a book on Crabbe ('Men of Letters' series, 1903), he is best known in literature as the biographer (1882; new ed. 1888) and editor (6 vols. 1883-88) of Lamb.

William Edward Hartpole Lecky, historian and moralist, was born at Dublin on 26th March 1838, and educated for the Irish Church first at Cheltenham and then at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book (1860) was on The Religious Tendencies of the Age. He soon resolved to make historical research his life-work; and after a distinguished literary career he was from 1895 till 1903 M.P. for Dublin University. In 1861 he published anonymously The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, four brilliant and sympathetic essays on Swift, Flood, Grattan, and O'Connell ; the greatly enlarged edition of 1903, which omitted Swift, expanded the O'Connell article into what is the best history of Ireland from the Union to the potato famine. His final judgment on Swift appeared in the introduction to an edition of the Dean's works (1897). His learned, luminous, and dispassionate History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (2 vols. 1865; new ed. 1899) does not deal with rationalism in the sense of religious free-thought or mere anti-supernaturalism in interpreting the Bible-still less with rationalism in the stricter sense of one specific school of German Biblical criticism. It has for its subject the dawn of the age of reason and the decline of the age of unhesitating faith, the gradual revolt, conscious or unconscious, against traditional, ecclesiastical, and clerical standards of judgment in all that concerns life and manners. The decay of the belief in witchcraft and magic; fading faith in the miraculous as an explanation of mysteries; the sapping of the persecuting spirit by the growth of toleration; the disappearance of superstition and the secularisation of life-all fall within the scope of this scholarly and original work. The statements, guardedly made, are supported by a mass of copious notes and references; and though the work is well written, Lecky attached more importance to the substance of what he said than to the manner of saying it. The tone is nowhere that of a partisan; but the ethical philosopher is the unhesitating friend of progress, and in his own sense of the word is a broad-minded rationalist. He did, and did admirably, some of the work Buckle proposed to do; but his spirit was not the spirit of Buckle-it was more truly historical, more genial and broad-minded.

The History of England in the Eighteenth Century (8 vols. 1878-90; 12th ed. in 12 vols. 1899) is not a history in strict chronological form, but rather a philosophical study of events and their causes, a succession of dissertations on the manners of the last age, relieved by an admirable

series of finished historical portraits. Perhaps the most original portion of the work is the treatment of the American war of independence; but the five volumes dealing with Ireland are even more valuable, and it should count as a special merit that one Irish historian was able to treat Irish political history with moderation and charity. Lecky stands midway between the dramatic school of literary historians and the modern scientific type of researchers in archives who are not ashamed of the dryasdust method. He rarely obtrudes any personal prepossession, and is singularly free from prejudice; he is afraid of purple patches and epigrams as disturbing the judicial attitude; but when he gives the reins to his imagination he commands an impressive diction. In him the task of the historian is not so much to paint a picture as to solve a problem-to explain a nation's present by the past. The History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (2 vols. 1869) is also learned, laborious, and judicial, and it occupies a field of its own, showing exceptional power of gathering vast masses of detached social phenomena, too much unheeded, into a new light, and of interpreting their significance and their lesson. A volume of poems (1891) was not generally considered to show Lecky at his best; he was essentially a thinker and expositor, and not a lyrist; but as counterpieces to his best prose the verses are of great interest to his readers. Lecky, who was in substance a Whig and a Moderate, took, in spite of his warm Irish sympathies, a strong side against Home Rule, and in his Democracy and Liberty (1896; new ed. 1899) revealed the anti-Radical who does not hesitate to lay bare the defects and dangerous tendencies of unrestrained democracy, at home and abroad. The Map of Life: Conduct and Character (1899), though it demands only the freedom which is consistent with a determinist view of life, is not a disquisition on the foundation of morals, but a compendium of practical observations on such subjects as the management of character, success, money, marriage, national and individual ideals, and the disproportionate amount of English energy devoted to political interests. Lecky, who was LL.D. and D.C.L., was admitted to the Privy Council in 1897; one of the first authors to receive the new Order of Merit in 1902, he was the first to be removed by death (22nd October 1903).

Persecutions of the Wesleyans.

From the time of the institution of lay preachers Methodism became in a great degree independent of the Established Church. Its chapels multiplied in the great towns, and its itinerant missionaries penetrated to the most secluded districts. They were accustomed to preach in fields and gardens, in streets and lecture-rooms, in market-places and churchyards. On one occasion we find Whitefield at a fair mounting a stage which had been erected for some wrestlers, and there denouncing the pleasures of the world; on another, preaching among the mountebanks at Moorfields; on a third, attracting around his pulpit 10,000 of the spectators at a racecourse; on a

fourth, standing beside the gallows at an execution to speak of death and of eternity. Wesley, when excluded from the pulpit of Epworth, delivered some of his most impressive sermons in the churchyard, standing on his father's tomb. Howell Harris, the apostle of Wales, encountering a party of mountebanks, sprang into their midst exclaiming, in a solemn voice, 'Let us pray,' and then proceeded to thunder forth the judgments of the Lord. Rowland Hill was accustomed to visit the great towns on market-day in order that he might address the people in the market-place, and to go from fair to fair preaching among the revellers from his favourite text, Come out from among them.' In this manner the Methodist preachers came in contact with the most savage elements of the population, and there were few forms of mob violence they did not experience. In 1741 one of their preachers named Seward, after repeated illtreatment in Wales, was at last struck on the head while preaching at Monmouth, and died of the blow.

In a

his supporters was ransacked, and bull-dogs were let loose upon him. At Dublin Whitefield was almost stoned to death. At Exeter he was stoned in the very presence of the bishop. At Plymouth he was violently assaulted and his life seriously threatened by a naval officer. (From England in the Eighteenth Century.)

Early Christianity and Patriotism. The relations of Christianity to the sentiment of patriotism were from the first very unfortunate. While the Christians were, from obvious reasons, completely separated from the national spirit of Judea, they found themselves equally at variance with the lingering remnants of Roman patriotism. Rome was to them the power of Antichrist, and its overthrow the necessary prelude to the millennial reign. They formed an illegal organisation, directly opposed to the genius of the empire, anticipating its speedy destruction, looking back with something more than despondency to the fate of the heroes who had adorned its past, and refusing resolutely to participate in those national spectacles which were the symbols and the expressions of patriotic feeling. Though scrupulously averse to all rebellion, they rarely concealed their sentiments, and the whole tendency of their teaching was to withdraw men as far as possible both from the functions and the enthusiasm of public life. It was at once their confession and their boast that no interests were more indifferent to them than those of their country. They regarded the lawfulness of taking arms as very questionable, and all those proud and aspiring qualities that constitute the distinctive beauty of the soldier's character as emphatically unchristian. Their home and their interests were in another world, and, provided only they were unmolested in their worship, they avowed with frankness, long after the empire had become Christian, that it was a matter of indifference to them under what rule they lived. Asceticism, drawing all the enthusiasm of Christendom to the desert life, and elevating as an ideal the extreme and absolute abnegation of all patriotism, formed the culmination of the movement, and was undoubtedly one cause of the downfall of the Roman Empire.

riot, while Wheatley was preaching at Norwich, a poor woman with child perished from the kicks and blows of the mob. At Wednesbury-a little town in Staffordshire-then very famous for its cockfights-numerous houses were wrecked; the Methodists were stoned, beaten with cudgels, or dragged through the public kennels. Women were atrociously abused. The leaders of the mob declared their intention to destroy every Methodist in the county. Wesley himself appeared in the town, and the rioters speedily surrounded the house where he was staying. With the placid courage that never deserted him in danger, he descended alone and unarmed into their midst. His perfect calmness and his singularly venerable appearance quelled the most noisy, and he succeeded by a few well-chosen words in producing a sudden reaction. His captors, however, insisted on his accompanying them to a neighbouring justice, who exhorted them to disperse in peace. The night had now fallen, and Wesley was actually returning to Wednesbury protected by a portion of the very crowd who had attacked him, when a new mob poured in from an adjoining village. He was seized by the hair and dragged through the streets. Some struck at him with cudgels. Many cried to knock out his brains and kill him at once. A river was flowing near, and he imagined they would throw him into the water. Yet in that dreadful moment his self-possession never failed him. He uttered in loud and solemn tones a prayer to God. He addressed those who were nearest him with all the skill that a consummate knowledge of the popular character could supply, and he speedily won over to his side some of the most powerful of the leaders. Gradually the throng paused, wavered, divided; and Wesley returned almost uninjured to his house. To a similar courage he owed his life at Bolton, when the house where he was preaching was attacked, and at last burst open, by a furious crowd thirsting for his life. Again and again he preached, like the other leaders of the movement, in the midst of showers of stones or tiles or rotten eggs. The fortunes of his brother were little different. At Cardiff, when he was preaching, women were kicked and their clothes set on fire by rockets. At St Ives and in the neighbouring villages the congregation were attacked with cudgels, and everything in the room where they were assembled was shattered to atoms. At Devizes a water-engine played upon the house where he was staying. His horses were seized. The house of one of

There are, probably, few subjects on which popular judgments are commonly more erroneous than upon the relations between positive religions and moral enthusiasm. Religions have, no doubt, a most real power of evoking a latent energy which, without their existence, would never have been called into action; but their influence is on the whole probably more attractive than creative. They supply the channel in which moral enthusiasm flows, the banner under which it is enlisted, the mould in which it is cast, the ideal to which it tends. The first idea the phrase 'a very good man' would have suggested to an early Roman would probably have been that of great and distinguished patriotism, and the passion and interest of such a man in his country's cause were in direct proportion to his moral elevation. Ascetic Christianity decisively diverted moral enthusiasm into another channel, and the civic virtues, in consequence, necessarily declined. The extinction of all public spirit; the base treachery and corruption pervading every department of the Government; the cowardice of the army; the despicable frivolity of character that led the people of Treves, when fresh from their burning city, to call for theatres and circuses, and the people of Roman Carthage to plunge wildly into the excitement of the chariot races,

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