In 1891 came _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_, which took the reading and criticising world by surprise. Hardy became explicit and charged the collective judgment of society with being shallow and contrary to the laws of nature. He dashed aside the conventions and proclaimed a "ruined" girl a "pure woman," and made definite charges against the code of society, which, in the belief that it was contending against immorality, was all the while destroying some of nature's finest and most sensitive material. Hardy does not preach, but there is more than a dramatic situation in Angel Clare's confession to Tess on the night of their wedding, for he shows the hopelessness of any justice coming to the "fallen" girl. Even if Tess had been faultless, all her faith, devotion, love and essential sweetness would have been given to an unjust and sinful man. The whole situation is summed up in the conversation which follows Angel Clare's confession of an "eight-and-forty hours'" dissipation. Hardy shows (and endorses) that it was quite right that Tess, with her natural, unsophisticated intelligence, should look upon her loss of virginity out of wedlock as a thing to be regretted and also a thing to be forgiven--just as the same event in Angel Clare's life: "Perhaps, although you smile, it is as serious as yours or more so." "It can hardly be more serious, dearest." "It cannot--oh no, it cannot." She jumped up joyfully at the hope. "No, it cannot be more serious, certainly," she cried, "because 'tis just the same!" For life and light and movement it would be hard to surpass Chapter XXVIII. of _Far from the Madding Crowd_, where Sergeant Troy's skilful and dazzling exhibition with a sword bewilders Bathsheba and ends in that unpropitious, fugitive kiss. It is a curious fact that, although Hardy's novels are such a true living influence, there are many people who feel that as a poet he has somehow just failed to hit the mark. But he himself regards his verse as the most important part of his work, and a section of his readers look upon it as the most distinctive English poetry of the past twenty years. In some quarters his poems are received with that curiosity which is awarded to a man of genius who breaks out freakishly with some strange hobby. People might look upon Rudyard Kipling with just such curiosity if he invited his friends to inspect his latest experiments in fretwork. However, to those of us who have followed his lyric poems and his supreme achievement, _The Dynasts_, it seems a well-nigh inexplicable phenomenon that much of his poetry should have passed into the limbo of forgotten things. Is there something wrong with his poems, or unusual about them? There is certainly a puzzling quality in his work. When his _Wessex Poems_ were published in 1899 the reviewers, in a chorus, decided that it was "want of form" which weakened his verse, and it is interesting to read how _Literature_ summed up his position as a poet: