Nothing more fatuous than this has been done by any writer of anything approaching ability in our time, and it is as false in characterisation as it is absurd in conception. Even Mr. Hall Caine rarely sinks lower. The same weakness drives Mr. Hardy to mar the evanescent reality of Tess herself. He will make her talk sometimes as the author of Far from the Madding Crowd or The Woodlanders is often wont to write. Her lover presses upon her a course of study in history; but she refuses.
'Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only—finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part? making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands and thousands, and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands and thousands. . . . I shouldn't mind learning why the sun shines on the just and the unjust alike, but that is what books will not tell me.'
Tess, it is true, as Mr. Hardy continually remarks, had passed her sixth standard; but even agricultural girls of the sixth standard are scarcely yet credible with a 'criticism of life' of this calibre. It is terrible to see a story-teller so unaware of what constitutes the one possible charm of his chief figure. Imagine Goethe making Marguerite talk like that! And it is not that Mr. Hardy is not at times able to render character. D'Urberville, for instance, in the first
