I am old enough to remember the clash of opinions over the tragic figure of Tess and the author’s presentation of her as “a pure woman”; how there were protests from pulpits; how the critics mitigated their praise of Hardy’s art with reproof of his ethics; but the story gripped the imagination of the public, and time has brought not a few of the moralists round to a recognition that if Hardy’s sense of morality was less conventional, it was also something nobler, more fundamental than their own. He will not accept the dogmas of orthodox respectability, but looks beyond the accidents of circumstance and conduct to the real good or evil that is in the human heart that wrongs or is wronged. The same passion for truth at all costs underlies his stark, uncompromising realism and his gospel of disillusion, his vision of men as puppets working out a destiny they cannot control. If he has, therefore, little faith in humanity, he has infinite compassion for it, and infinite pardon. The irony of his stories is the irony he finds in life itself, and as true to human experience as are the humor and the pathos of them. Other eyes, another temperament, may read a different interpretation of it all; he has honestly and courageously given us his own. The outcry against “Tess” was mild compared to the babble of prudish censure with which “Jude the Obscure” was received in many quarters, and it is small wonder that these criticisms goaded Hardy to a resolve that he would write no more novels for a world that could so misunderstand his purposes and misconstrue his teachings. “The Well-Beloved,” though it appeared a year later than “Jude,” had been written and published serially five years before, and it was with “Jude,” when his power was at its zenith, that Thomas Hardy wrote finis to his work as a novelist. Happily his adherence to this resolve drove him back on the art he had abjured in his youth, and the last quarter of a century has yielded some half dozen books of his poems that we would not willingly have lost. Above all, it has yielded that stupendous chronicle-drama of the Napoleonic wars, “The Dynasts,” which is sometimes acclaimed as the highest and mightiest effort of his genius. This drama, and his ballads and lyrics, often too overweighted with thought to have any beat of wings in them, are at one with his novels in the sincere, sombre philosophy of life that inspires them, the darkling imagination with which it is bodied forth, and the brooding, forceful personality which speaks unmistakably through all.