In _Antony Garstin’s Courtship_ he is back in his own countryside of Cumberland among the shrewd, hard Dale folk. It is a little masterpiece conceived almost in the hopeless bitterness of Hardy at his darkest, most pessimistic moment. The crudeness in workmanship has gone, only the relentless inevitability of it all remains like the tragedies of life itself. Rosa Blencarn, the parson’s niece, a mere cheap flirt of unfinished comeliness, is but the bone of contention between the personalities of Antony and his mother. The widow Garstin is as fine a character as Crackanthorpe, in his twenty-two stories, has created. She lives, and in her veins flows the passion of disappointed age. ‘She was a heavy-built woman, upright, stalwart almost, despite her years. Her face was gaunt and sallow; deep wrinkles accentuated the hardness of her features. She wore a widow’s black cap above her iron-grey hair, gold-rimmed spectacles, and a soiled chequered apron.’ How easily we can see her saying to her great hulking son: ‘T’ hoose be mine, t’ Lord be praised,’ she continued in a loud, hard voice, ‘an’ as long as he spare me, Tony, I’ll na’ see Rosa Blencarn set foot inside it.’ It has all the unsavoury cruelty of humanity, and to find other such scenes in English literature we have to come down to Caradoc Evans’s _My People_, or James Joyce. In _Trevor Perkins_, in a brief masterly way, we have the soul of the average young man of the nineties, who has ceased to believe in God or tolerate his parents, sketched for us. He walks out with the waitress of his bunshop, and we realise at once he is of those who are doomed to make fools of themselves on the reef of her sex. The last story, _The Turn of the Wheel_, is the history of the daughter who believes in her self-made father, and despises her sidetracked mother as an inferior being, only to find she has made a great mistake. It is one of the longest stories he wrote, and moves easily in the higher strata of London society. From this fashionable world to the rude and rugged scars and fells of Cumberland is a far cry; but here, as elsewhere, Crackanthorpe finds the friction of humanity is its own worst enemy. Yet behind all this impenetrably impersonal bitter play of human passions in these short stories, one feels somehow or other the distant beats of the author’s compassionate heart, which his sickness of life made him forcibly stop in the pride of his youth before he had time to realise himself or fulfil his rich promise. IV