Yet let us not find fault, for terrible as it is to find a man who, discarding the tradition that it is the office of poets to soothe and amuse their fellow-prisoners with pretty fables and tales of the governor's beneficence--a man who rejects this almost universal tradition and appals his hearers with an account of malignant treacheries committed by that governor--yet I sympathise with the temper that does this, and believe that it has its roots in a genuine and manly feeling, the feeling that I tried to suggest at the beginning. "Hardy is a strong example of that curious, inverted Manichæism so characteristic of our time--a sort of mediæval horror of the grossness of matter, balanced by a most unmediæval sense of the utter madness of insulting and despising matter, seeing that the tyranny of it is absolute. "He is perhaps the first Briton to write as a true man of the people on such a subject, that is to say, to take it quite seriously. His story is told with such passion that almost every particle of doctrinaire affectation or easy pattern work is consumed and refined away, and he has created in Tess the most inexpressibly pathetic figure that I know of in literature." About Zola he writes in a letter of July, 1893:-- "Perhaps you have read 'Le Rêve.' It and 'La Debâcle' are the only two of Zola's longer novels that could be recommended to a lady, and even the latter with some misgiving. I cannot say that I think 'Le Rêve' one of Zola's best works. I am far from sure that the French critic who said: 'Nous préférons Monsieur Zola à quatre pattes' was not in the right. Nevertheless, there are passages in it stamped by Zola's unique greatness. With regard to its defects, I would rather say nothing at present, except one--the end strikes me as absurd, _franchement mauvais et du placage litteraire_--a recrudescence of something that we have left far behind, something dead that should have been left to bury its dead. All the same there are, I think, truly great things in the book." Of Marie Bashkirtseff, September, 1891, he writes:--