BOOKS.
MR. HARDY'S " TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES." MR. HARDY has written one of his most powerful novels, perhaps the most powerful which he ever wrote, to illustrate his conviction that not only is there no Providence guiding individual men and women in the right way, but that, in many cases at least, there is something like a malign fate which draws them out of the right way into the wrong way. Tess of the D'Urbervilles is declared by Mr. Hardy to be " a pure woman," and as he has presented her, we do not doubt that her instincts were all pure enough, more
. pure probably than those of a great number of women who never fall into her disgrace and shame. She was, of course, much more sinned against than sinning, though
• Tao of the D'Urberoilles, a Pure Woman. Faithfully presented by Thomas Hardy. 3 vols. London: James R. Osgood. Mcllvaine, and Co. Mr. Hardy is too " faithful " a portrait-painter to leave out touches which show that her instincts even as regards purity, were not of the very highest class. The coarse expression which he attributes to her in relation to her companions (Vol. I., p. 127), when she declares that if she had known what. they were like, she would not have so let herself down as to come with them, betrays perfectly well her knowledge of the dangers before her,—indeed, she had had plenty of forecast of those dangers, and she was well aware that the looseness of her companions was more or less due to the profligacy of the man whom she disliked and feared, and to whom her ruin was ultimately due. Yet she deliberately forsook their company, because they were insolent and taunting, to put herself into the power of the very person who, as she knew, was responsible for their misconduct as well as for the tempta- tions thrown in her own way. That course was not due to an instinct of purity, but to an instinct of mere timidity and disgust. But though we quite admit that in her instincts Tess was as pure as multitudes of women who never suffered what she had to suffer, we cannot at all admit that, if she be " faithfully presented," she was at all faithful to her own sense of duty in the course of the story. Again and again, and yet again, he shows her shrinking from the obvious 1 and imperative duty of the moment when she must have felt that the whole sincerity of her life was at stake. To accep0 the love of her husband without telling him that she had been the more or less innocent victim of a man to whom she had borne a child, was not certainly the act of a "pure woman," and whatever palliation there may have been for it in her passionate love, it was the very way to ensure the steady lowering of her sense of duty, and invite the misery which was the natural consequence. But even after that and after she had confessed to her husband, which very naturally produced a great alienation, she repeatedly shrinks from the obvious and emphatic duty of the hour, which she must have felt to be the duty enjoined by her love for him, no less than the duty enjoined by the barest self- respect. She will not stay with her parents, where she would have been comparatively safe, and where her husband had assumed that she would be safe, but goes out into all the great dangers of field-life,—dangers, we mean, for a character and beauty such as hers. When she comes to the end of her resources, and is aware that, under the terms of her husband's instructions, she ought to have applied to hia father and mother for more means, she is deterred from doing so by the most trivial pride, which was natural enough, but which the sense of her general unprotected- ness ought at once to have overruled. Still worse, when, on her return from this failure of purpose, she finds herself once more in the snares of the miserable man who had been her ruin, instead of at once taking refuge with her father and mother-in-law, who were her natural protectors, she trusts entirely to letters which had to go to Brazil and (as it proved) to return from Brazil, before her husband could get them, and never once thinks of repeating the application from which nothing but the least justifiable of motives had deterred her. We must say that had Tess been what Mr. Hardy calls her, a really pure woman, she could not possibly have hesitated to apply to her father and mother-in- law when she felt,-as she did feel, that it was a question of life and death to her fidelity of purpose and her purity of heart whether she obtained their protection or not. On the whole, we deny altogether that Mr. Hardy has made out his case for Tess. She was pure enough in her instincts, considering the circumstances and the class in which she was born. But she had no deep sense of fidelity to those instincts. If she had, she would not have allowed herself time after time to be turned from the plain path of duty, by the fastidiousness of a personal pride which was quite out of pro- portion to the extremity of her temptations and her perils. It is no doubt true that her husband behaved with even less fidelity to her than she to him. Perhaps that was natural in such a pagan as Mr. Hardy depicts him. But we cannot for a moment admit that even on his own portraiture of the circumstances of the case, Tess acted as a pure woman should have acted under such a stress of temptation and peril. Though pure in instinct, she was not faithful to her pure instinct. We should, indeed, say that Mr. Hardy, instead of illus- trating his conviction that there is no Power who guides and guards those who are faithful to their best lights, has only illustrated what every Christian would admit, that if fine
natures will not faithfully adhere to such genuine instincts as they have, they may deteriorate, and will deteriorate, in consequence of that faithlessness.
While we cannot at all admire Mr. Hardy's motive in writing this very powerful novel, we must cordially admit that he has seldom or never written anything so truly tragic land so dramatic. The beauty and realism of the delineations of the life on the large dairy-farm; the sweetness and, on the whole, generosity of the various dairymaids' feelings for each other; the vivacity of the description of the cows themselves; the perfect insight into the conditions of rustic lives; the true pathos of Tess's sufferings ; the perfect naturalness, and even inevitability, of all her impulses; the strange and horrible mixture of feelings with which she regards her destroyer, when, believing that all her chance of happiness is over, she sells herself ultimately for the benefit of her mother and brother and sisters; the masterful conception of the seducer as a convert to Antinomianism, and the ease with which his new faith gives way to a few recitals by Tess of her husband's ground for scepticism (with which, however, we are not favoured); the brilliant description of the flight of Clare and Tess, and of the curious equanimity with which Tess meets the consciousness of having committed murder, seeing that it has restored her for five days to her husband's heart,—are all pictures of almost unrivalled power, though they evidently proceed from the pantheistic conception that impulse is the daw of the universe, and that will, properly so called, is a non-existent fiction. We confess that this is a story which, in spite of its almost unrivalled power, it is very difficult to read, because in almost every page the mind rebels against the steady assumptions of the author, and shrinks from the untrue pic- ture of a universe so blank and godless,—Shelley's " blank, -grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world." We can hardly give -a better conception of the force of the picture, than in the passage in which Tess goes to sleep under the shadow of Stonehenge, with Clare at her side, after she has gathered from her husband that for their love there is, in his belief, no resurrection, and after calmly recommending to him her -sister as her successor in this world :— "‘ Angel, if anything happens to me, will you watch over 'Liza- Lu for my sake ?' she asked, when they had listened a long time to the wind among the pillars. = I will.'—' She is so good and simple and pure. 0, Angel—I wish you would marry her if you lose me, as you will do shortly. 0, if you would ! '= If I lose you I lose all! And she is my sister-in-law.'—' That's nothing, dearest. People marry sisters-in-law continually about Marlott ; and 'Liza-Ln is so gentle and sweet, and she is growing so beautiful. .0, I could share you with her willingly when we are spirits ! If you would train her and teach her, Angel, and bring her up for your own self ! . . . She has all the best of me without the bad -of me ; and if she were to become yours it would almost seem as if death had not divided us. . . . Well, I have said it. I won't mention it again.'—She ceased, and he fell into thought. In the -far north-east sky he could see between the pillars a level streak .of light. The uniform concavity of black cloud was lifting bodily like the lid of a pot, letting in at the earth's edge the coming day, :against which the towering monoliths and trilithons began to be blackly defined.—' Did they sacrifice to God here ?' asked she.- ` No,' said he.= Who to ?'—' I believe to the sun. That lofty stone set away by itself is in the direction of the sun, which will presently rise behind it'—`This reminds me, dear,' she said. ' You remember you never would interfere with any belief o' mine before we were married? But I knew your mind all the same, and I thought as you thought—not from any reasons o' my own, but because you thought so. Tell me now, Angel, do you think we shall meet again after we are dead? I want to know.'—He kissed her to avoid a reply at such a time.= 0, Angel—I fear that means no !' said she, with a suppressed sob. ' And I wanted so to see you again—so much, so mach ! What—not even you and I, Angel, who love each other so well ? '—Like a greater than him- self, to the critical question at the critical time he did not answer ; and they were again silent."
For the last words of a murderess who makes not an effort of any kind to ignore or deny the murder, this picture could only have been conceived as the outcome of a pantheistic philo- sophy. The only fault in Mr. Hardy's style is an excess of pedantic phraseology in various parts of the book, which reminds us of George Eliot in her scientific mood.
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