But no one has described inanimate, humble life of the fields as he has; the lonely downs, grass, furze, the forsaken sea’s edge; the desertion and chill of winter or early autumn, on lonely settlements and isolated homesteads. To read him is good as taking a vacation, he gives so truly the freshness of open spaces. He paints in words the same type in England that Millet painted with brush in France. In both is reverence, sincerity. Like Millet he lived among the people he pictured. His observation of the fields, the folds is loving, fine. The total effect is that his novels are _rooted_ somewhere; they have definite place. They are homely, solid, instead of brilliant, detached. Now almost everything is superficially observed. I enjoy contact with a mind that knows basic things of the land written about, and I like his scholarly respect for old English and Latin masters. I like all that dissevers from cheap, showy, tinsel, blatant novelty. Hardy said once that the speaking age is passing for the writing age. Now the writing age is passing for the _seeing_ (Movie) Age. It is too bad suns insist upon shining singly! As for me I shall remain, perhaps all my time, in the first two ages, finding in them, as I do, pleasure. In the world of Hardy, the amusements of his characters are things that are no more. Imagine, if you can, a novelist of today having characters play _chess_. It seems a thousand years ago! It relegates them to the Romans. And the puritan manners, outlook, of his women are something inconceivable, even in strait-laced little-town places. This narrowness, puritan prejudice, which covers the lives of his characters, seems old. It gives us means by which to measure changes which have swept life of English speaking peoples since he wrote. And years have been few. We have been going at cyclonic speed. We are on the down-hill spin of civilization. Hardy’s books bespeak leisure; leisure to observe, think, live, write. They are to be read, leisurely, with loving attention to small details. They are made to sip like wine whose supply is not great and may not be made again. He does not believe in art written in shorthand. I like to contemplate his England: England of stately, ordered living, great country homes; of love of forests and fields; and the sustained interest in noble scholarly things, in extensive knowledge of masters of Greek and Latin. The feeling for caste is strong, reflecting truthfully the England he knew, that feeling for class, which the new civilization will destroy. Old age comes soon in Hardy’s novels, and lessening of courage. He lacks faith in life through excessive sensitiveness. His men are middle aged at thirty. Sometimes there is Miltonic ring to a sentence of Hardy’s. This, for instance: “Grimness was in every feature and to its very bowels the universal shape (cliff) was desolation.”