Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/175

Rh home of strangers, an incident superficially so improbable, is made only less actual than the weird journey to Stonehenge, and Tess's sacrificial sleep on the altar-stone. After all, the book has in it the sob of the earth's suffering, 'the sense of tears in mortal things,' the vain struggle of the human heart against unjust fatality; and of how many books, not to say of how many novels, that appear in this England in a generation can one say so much?—in this England where the novel has become the helpless prey of the Philistine and the Philistiness—where the only variation possible on the banalities of an ignorant and abject conventionality seems to be fantastic revels in the English tongue, and the literary woe and abomination alluded to by more than one of the prophets.

Yet one cannot for a moment hesitate in one's recognition of the fact that Mr. Hardy's novel is not a success—is a failure. It is too faulty to pass. The gaps that represent bad work are too large and too frequent. One has no desire to come back to it. A second reading leaves a lower estimate of it than the first, and a third is not possible. There is the immense pity of it! The artistic blemishes which were in Mr. Hardy's early books might, and in all probability would, have been eradicated if from the beginning he had had to face anything like