But this is Hardy's dominant idea; it is a belief on which he insists with a propagandist enthusiasm which sometimes mars the artistic value of his work. No Scotch or English members of some stricter offshoot of a strict Calvinistic sect ever was more firmly convinced that this earth is a vale of tears, or more eager to spread this belief. Every writer, I think, deals with the characters who are his creations as he imagines God to deal with mankind. This is why literary criticism is closer to theology than to any other science; this is why we cannot claim to understand any writer unless we know what he thinks about God. And the God of Hardy's belief, as indicated in his long succession of stories and poems, is no more the remote, indifferent, sensuous, self-sufficient Deity of the pagan fatalist than he is the loving and omnipotent Father of true Christian belief. Instead he is the stern, avenging Deity of the Hebrews, without pity, accessible to no intercessors, the Deity whom we find to-day fearfully worshiped by adherents of the bleakest forms of Puritanism. It would be a misnomer to call Hardy's philosophy a Christian fatalism, but it is a fatalism which is the basis of the religious systems of many who since 1517 have professed and called themselves Christians. I am frequently impressed, as I read Hardy, with what I may call the evangelical cast of his mind. He is so intent on announcing his discovery that mankind is fallible, unhappy, helpless, undesirable. The people of Hardy's stories are so virtueless, for the most part, that the reader can readily believe that Hardy is determined to show that they deserve no pity from the extraordinary Deity who is also a creature of Hardy's imagination, and that in his own way the novelist (like his greatest Puritan predecessor in literature) is trying to "justify the ways of God toward man." And "The Mayor of Casterbridge," with its lovely pictures of Wessex hills and valleys and its most unlovely pictures of Wessex men and women, irresistibly recalls lines from a certain popular evangelical hymn--the lines which tell of a place "where every prospect pleases and only man is vile."