Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/159

 A very similar plot was used by Mark Twain in the short story, Edward Mills and George Benton. Edward Mills adopts this motto as a guide for his life: "Be pure, honest, sober, industrious, and considerate of others, and success in life is assured." His half-brother, George Benton, is dissolute, lazy, and selfish in everything, yet he wins the sympathy of his fellow-beings, including the woman who loves Mills, at every point of his career, even up to his execution for the murder of his brother, who has lived a life of unrewarded uprightness. It is interesting to compare Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy, noting how the former, beginning as a humorist and a writer of genial tales of the strenuous life of the Middle West, ended His career in a cloud of misanthropy and real pessimism, while the latter, beginning as we have seen, with gloomy but honest conclusions concerning life, somewhat similar to those of the American writer, ends with a real faith in human nature that survives his deeply rooted and early propensity to stress the theme of disillusionment and with more than a vague hint at the possibility of the ultimate rightness of things.

The Bride-Night Fire, a Wessex tradition told in ballad-form, is one of the few pieces that actually saw the light of publication before the Wessex Poems came out finally in 1898. It had appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine for November, 1875, under the title The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's. Like the other poems here under consideration, it was first written down in 1866. Although of no very great significance for the development of Hardy's thought, it is of considerable interest as an early humorous treatment of an incident, serious enough