The comparison to Hardy has become a commonplace of any criticism of Mr. Phillpotts’ literary output, and the comparison carries an inevitable distinction and disparagement. The distinction is that Mr. Phillpotts is the one writer worthy to be called a disciple of the Wessex chronicler, and the disparagement is in the differentiation at once apparent in the similarity. Primitive nature, physical and human, is Mr. Phillpotts’ theme as it is Mr. Hardy’s, and the primal passions in rustic life are the elements of both novelists’ tragedy and comedy. But though one man may want and try to make from the same material the same things as wrought by another, it is out of his power to do so, and Mr. Phillpotts’ work lacks the strength and seriousness of Mr. Hardy’s. In the first place, the colorless irony of the older writer, epitomized so perfectly in his title, “Far from the Madding Crowd,” is lacking entirely in Mr. Phillpotts, and the latter’s florid descriptions and psychologic analyses fail of the Hardy effect because of this lack. The personal note of Mr. Hardy, ironic, accentless, incisive, is the salt to his magnificent dish of natural elements, without which their strength and freshness would pall upon the taste. And as a literary artist, too, Mr. Phillpotts falls below his master. Despite the wealth of natural description with which he burdens so heavily his narratives, there is nothing that touches the Hardy landscapes in power and artistic truth. The wonderful and haunting picture of the moor in “The Return of the Native” is Hardy at highwater mark, it is true, but there is nothing in the Phillpotts gallery that can even be compared to it. “The Secret Woman” is a story of human frailty, passion, crime, and soul struggle, set in the rocks and glades of Dartmoor. An illicit love between a married man and a beautiful and pagan-hearted girl is the basis of the plot, and the murder of the man by his wife in a fit of jealous rage is the first act of the tragedy. A touch worthy of Hardy occurs in the interview between husband and wife just after the latter’s discovery of the man’s unfaithfulness, when a sudden gust of wind and rain drowns the wife’s voice as she offers pardon, thus through the blow of blind fate sealing the husband’s doom. The murder is witnessed by the two sons, but is kept secret, though it divides the brothers and fills the mother’s life with a never-dying repentance. The figure of the murderess, Anne Redvers, and the study of her character and soul development, are the most elaborate and striking work of the book, but it is Salome, “the secret woman,” and her intrigue with the dead man, unknown and unsuspected, that furnish the motive for the drama. In striking contrast are the two women, one dark, stern, conscientious, softening and mellowing through sorrow and repentance into sympathy and forgiveness, the other fair, conscienceless, self-indulgent, swayed but by emotion and passion.