When we read a newspaper article on the conditions of life in Bermondsey our first question is: “That is all very well. But is it thus that the majority of people in Bermondsey exist?” And when we read a novel about Bermondsey we apply the same standard. “Is this,” we ask ourselves, “how the majority of Bermondsians live?” If we decide that it is not, we say that the novel “is not true to life.” We find it hard to rid ourselves of the idea that all writing must be a form of special reporting. And, of course, for the purposes of a novel it does not in the least matter whether the lives of the majority of Bermondsians do, or do not, correspond with those of the hero and the heroine. Universality is not obtained by cataloguing the routine of a number of uninteresting persons. It is unlikely that many dairy-maids have been the victims of such a disconcerting series of adventures as befell Tess of the D’Urbevilles. But Tess is true to life. It is true to life because Thomas Hardy is a novelist and not a journalist. If he had intended his book to be an “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” if his creative impulse had been inspired by a wish to improve the lot of the Wessex farm-hand, the critics would have been justified in saying: “This is a piece of special pleading based on a particularly unusual combination of circumstances. We therefore consider it to be untrue to life.” For the journalist the word “life” implies the external conditions under which the majority of people live; for the artist, life is the reality behind livelihood, and for the revelation of that reality the choice of subject is comparatively unimportant. The same moment of reality may be presented equally effectively through the most diverse mediums. The appreciation of the temporal quality of life, of the approach of age, the sense of weakening power, is found in the work of nearly all great writers; but it is expressed by each writer in terms of the phenomena with which he is most familiar. Anthony Trollope would find relief from such a mood in the study of a kindly, ineffectual parson. George Moore would tell the story of some butterfly of the Nouvelle Athène, some Marie Pellegrin. Neville Cardus would recall the fleeting splendour of Tom Richardson. To the journalist there would seem little in common between these three studies. But the artist would see that the subject was in each case the same. In “La Terre,” Zola told the same story that Shakespeare told in “Lear.”