I do not wish by any ingenious fabrication to prove that Hardy was not a pessimist. He is the father of the English school that refuse to be either deists or moralists, and, like them, pushes his stories to an end that is often bitter. His temperament is cast in that brooding, reflective mood that concerns itself less readily with jollity than with grief, and is therefore ever slanting toward pessimism. This, even his style indicates. Like the somber Hawthorne's, his style is brooding, adumbrative, rather than incisive or brilliant, and it often limps among the facts of his story like a man in pain. Indeed, Hardy is seldom a stylist, except when his mood is somber; therefore it is by his sadder passages that we remember him. Yet the most important fact about Hardy is not that he is pessimistic. His manner of telling a story, however, helps to confirm the popular impression. Hardy's plots are a series of accidents, by which the doom of some lovely or aspiring spirit comes upon it by the slow drift of misfortune. Tess, Grace, Eustacia, Jude--it is clear enough to what joys and sorrows their natures make them liable. But the master prepares for them trivial error, unhappy coincidence, unnecessary misfortune, until it is not surprising if the analytic mind insists that he is laboring some thesis of pessimism to be worked out by concrete example. Nevertheless, this is incomplete definition, and it is annoying that the dean of letters in our tongue should be subjected to a sophomoric formula in which the emphasis is wrongly placed. The critics, in general, have defined this pessimism, stopped there, and said, this is Hardy. But youth that does not like pessimism reads Hardy avidly. More light is needed.