sight; in the words his people use, in the medley of pagan superstition, witchcraft, and confused Christian belief which colours their imagination, in the implements they use and in their houses, the older world is kept alive.

"Many of the labourers about here," writes Mr. Hardy, "bear corrupted Norman names; many are the descendants of the squires in the last century, and their faces even now strongly resemble the portraits in the old manor-houses. Many are, must be, the descendants of the Romans who lived here in great pomp and state for four hundred years. I have seen faces here that are the duplicates of those fine faces I saw at Fiesole, where also I picked up Roman coins, the counterpart of those we find here so often. They even use Latin words here, which have survived everything."

The scientific and philosophic love of unity which distinguishes Mr. Hardy not only prompts him with a true instinct to weave the past into the present history of man, but he brings inanimate nature as a moulding force into human life. The sky, the clouds, hills, moors, trees, the weather, sunshine and rain, enter into the life-story of his characters. In Rousseau nature was revolutionary, calling man back from convention to the primitive instinct; in Wordsworth nature is kindly

and beneficent, a kindred spirit with the moods of the human mind; in Mr. Hardy the bond between man and nature is that he works for his living upon the bosom of the great mother earth, and draws his sustenance from her.

"The poetry of his mode of life consists in his having to work for his own living in a dependence upon the moods of the sky, air, and earth."

It would be impossible to detach Giles Winterborne and Marty South in The Woodlanders, a book full of the poetry of solitary woodland places, from their environment. In reading the narrative we never forget that the woods and copses surround us; the characters belong inevitably to the soil on which they were born, the silence and brooding quiet of the woods passes into their lives and tinges their thought with a passive melancholy. A passage in illustration, distinctive of Mr. Hardy's attitude to life, may be quoted from the book. Winterborne and Marty South are planting young fir-trees

"How they sigh directly we put 'em upright, though while they are lying down they don't sigh at all,' said Marty.

it.'

"Do they?' said Giles. I've never noticed

"She erected one of the young pines in its hole, and held up her finger. The soft musical

breathing instantly set in, which was not to cease night or day till the grown tree should be felled— probably long after the two planters had been felled themselves.

"It seems to me,' the girl continued, as if they sigh because they are very sorry to begin life in earnest just as we be.'"

In another book, The Return of the Native, the scene of the story is Egdon Heath, a bare and lonely upland. With that peculiar power which belongs to him, Mr. Hardy makes the heath play an actual part in the story. Like a presiding genius it broods over the destinies of the mortals who pass their brief and fretted lives upon its slopes, shaping the end of their fitful impulses and endeavours, while they move and act, unconscious of the silent and irresistible forces lying about them. In the novels we see a nature endued with sentient life, akin to the world of pagan thought, for which hills, trees, and streams were the abode or outward manifestation of deity, though for Mr. Hardy the spirit behind the universe is an impersonal and heedless power.

In passages descriptive of nature, and in scenepainting, Mr. Hardy is not the poet of sunshine and blue skies; he is not the sentimentalist or the joyous dweller in the open air, nor does he show the passionate faith of Wordsworth in the

friendly influences of nature. His attitude is essentially introspective; he sees the world and the outer face of nature, not as the background of man's life, but as the partner of his tragic destiny. His knowledge of the changing moods of earth, air, and sky is intimate and true, representing something more than the cultured sympathy of the educated mind; but the landscape of Mr. Hardy rarely smiles. It is not forbidding and unfriendly, yet the hills and fields wear an austere countenance. His imagination is from the first severe and impressive; even sunshine and flowers, the breath of summer evenings, and the song of birds will seem to him an inexplicable monotony of repetition. He can speak of "the voice of a weak bird singing a trite old evening song that might

doubtless have been heard on the hill at the same hour, and with the self-same trills, quavers, and breves, at any sunset of the season for centuries untold." It would be wrong, however, to suggest the impression that a weak melancholy haunts Mr. Hardy's pictures of nature; for few writers make us feel more intensely the grave simplicity and dignity of heath, hill, and field. In natural description he shows a fine faculty for combining detail with broad effect; we can feel the weather, the wind, the atmo

sphere, we can see the lights and shadows cross the land; and the scene is impressed upon the mind as a single whole. In conveying a picture to the imagination he relies little upon the magic of words, but gains his ends by force of a slow and cumulative style, by the juxtaposition and weaving of detail with detail.

Mr. Hardy's pictures of country life and country ways might well receive a volume of commentary to themselves. It would not be too much to say that in this respect he has set a new standard of poetic truth and realism; and he helps us to appreciate afresh the comprehensive insight and knowledge of Shakespeare, to whose clowns and bumpkins his country folk are so nearly alike. His farm-hands, shepherds, furze - carriers, woodlanders, and dairymaids are "racy of the soil," neither idealised Strephons or Daphnes, nor the clever but artificial reconstruction of the novelist who needs a background to his country-house or shootingparty. Mr. Hardy labours under no illusions, nor does he plead the rural and simple life. He sees the tragedy, comedy, humour, sadness, and joy of the countryside, not as something which lies beneath the surface of a progressive and civilised world, a backwater of life, but as an identical world in all the essentials of pleasure