Not to appreciate the power and beauty of his
manner, when his real inspiration holds him, is to confess that the
genuinely classical in style and the genuinely pagan in feeling has no
meaning for you. No English writer, whether in prose or poetry, has
ever caught so completely the magic of the earth and the quaint
humors, tragical and laughable, of those who live inured to her moods;
who live with her moroseness, her whimsicality, her vindictiveness,
her austerity, her evasive grace.
Mr. Hardy's clairvoyant feeling for Nature is, however, only the
background of his work. He is no idyllic posture-monger. The march of
events as they drive forward the primitive earth-born men and women of
Wessex, thrills one with the same weight of accumulated fatality,
as--the comparison is tedious and pedantic--the fortunes of the
ill-starred houses of Argos and Thebes. One peculiarity of Mr. Hardy's
method must finally be mentioned, as giving their most characteristic
quality to these formidable scenes--I mean his preference for form
over color. Who can forget those desolately emphatic human
protagonists silhouetted so austerely along the tops of hills and
against the perspectives of long white roads?
75.
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