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GEORGE MOORE AND JOHN FREEMAN
goes away for a little while, and returns to find her asleep. The situation is one which seems to Mr Hardy opportune for a meditation, wherefore he begins:
"But, some might say, where was Tess's guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked. Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive,"
a sentence, Mr Freeman, that nobody but a poet could have written. The French have a good word for this kind of story: coco, and coco may be translated into English as Mother Goose. After the incident in the wood Tess returns to her home, and about a year afterwards we read of her in a cornfield with a baby, who is taken ill and whom she baptizes herself in the middle of the night. When the baby dies Tess continues to work in her parents' house, and then becomes a dairymaid; and in the dairy she meets Angel Clare, whom she marries, without, however, telling him that she has had a baby. But on the night of the wedding she makes up her mind to confess everything to him, and is glad when Angel Clare confides to her the fact he had once: "plunged into eight and forty hours' dissipation with a stranger," and that he has "never repeated the offence." You will see, Mr Freeman, that the interest of the story concentrates not so much on Tess' confession, but on the character the author gives to the confession, for, like a wood, a confession can take every kind of shape. George Eliot would have said to herself: Angel Clare may persuade her to confess; he may be anxious to know the truth for pure motives, or he may be anxious to know the truth for impure motives; he may be willing to hear, and then unwilling to hear. It may be that Mr Hardy did not consider the different sides from which the scene might be viewed, or it may be that he considered them all and came to the conclusion that his imagination could not reveal to him the words that Tess would speak to Angel Clare. Discretion is said