"Scott is, of course, without a trace of George Eliot's defect, and always treats Effie Deans like a gentleman. By certain touches, too, he indicates how deep is his concern for her, such as that crowd of blackguards and urchins about the court-house, for whose holiday Effie was so nearly murdered. But besides the fact that Scott has no true grasp of feminine character, he makes Jeanie his heroine and never really undertakes to tell Effie's story. And George Eliot, after disposing of Hetty in a hurry, actually offers to interest us in the love affairs of that preaching woman! In Fantine there are details perhaps more intolerable to hear than this story of Hardy's, but the general effect is less strong. For partly we distrust Hugo's rhetoric, and besides, we are beguiled and consoled at the end, however unreasonably, by his 'fortunately God knows where to look for graves,' while in 'Tess' the concluding incidents come with a thunderbolt inevitableness, and at the end nothing stands between us and the hideous ignominy, the entire forgetfulness, the utter nakedness. But though her life has become forfeit, perhaps that ignominy of the actual gibbet might have been spared. In any case, there is nothing to be said at the end of such a tale but—
"Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,
* * * * * * *
And maiden virture rudely strumpeted!"
Yet let us not find fault, for terrible as it is to find a man who, discarding the tradition that it is the office of poets to soothe and amuse their fellow-prisoners with pretty fables and tales of the governor's beneficence—a man who rejects this almost universal tradition and appals his hearers with an account of malignant treacheries committed by that governor—yet I sympathise with the temper that does this, and believe that it has its roots in a genuine and manly feeling, the feeling that I tried to suggest at the beginning.
"Hardy is a strong example of that curious, inverted Manichæism so characteristic of our time—a sort of mediæval horror of the grossness of matter, balanced by a most unmediæval sense of the utter madness of insulting and despising matter, seeing that the tyranny of it is absolute.
"He is perhaps the first Briton to write as a true man of the people on such a subject, that is to say, to take it quite seriously. His story is told with such passion that almost every particle of doctrinaire affectation or easy pattern work is consumed and refined away, and he has created in Tess the most inexpressibly pathetic figure that I know of in literature."
About Zola he writes in a letter of July, 1893:—
"Perhaps you have read 'Le Rêve.' It and 'La Debâcle' are the only two of Zola's longer novels that could be recommended to a lady, and even the latter with some misgiving. I cannot say that I think 'Le Rêve' one of Zola's best works. I am far from sure that the French critic who said: 'Nous préférons Monsieur Zola à quatre pattes' was not in the right. Nevertheless, there are passages in it stamped by Zola's unique greatness. With regard to its defects, I would rather say nothing at present, except one—the end strikes me as absurd, franchement mauvais et du placage litteraire—a recrudescence of something that we have left far behind, something dead that should have been left to bury its dead. All the same there are, I think, truly great things in the book."
Of Marie Bashkirtseff, September, 1891, he writes:—
"Concerning Marie Bashkirtseff, she seems to me to have had nearly every gift except two, namely imagination and heart. Above all, a sort of critical intuition, which prevented her from ever resting satisfied in anything second-rate. She was a typical little Russian, small of stature, dark of tint; in temperament sensitive, romantic, versatile; unlike the northern Russians, who are prevalently tall and fair and have a certain contempt for the unpractical. Nearly the whole Russian harvest of folk-songs and cognate treasure comes from the south, from Cossacks and little Russians, the true Muscovite being almost a songless bird. Marie must have had in a high degree the incomparable grace and distinction of her countrywomen, with that wonderful animation and 'fever of life' which makes the atmosphere of Russian society the warmest and brightest in the world. As to your statement that 'some of her failings, like her love of luxury and her desire to be attended to at all costs, are pure vanity and wormwood,' I have always stuck up for this barbaric element, and believe that largely on it depends the prodigious formative power of a free feminine influence—that thing of such rarity as to be almost non-existent in our puritanical society. I know a man at half a glance who has ever been under it."
Referring to his correspondent's remarks that Russians seem to look at religious questions like intelligent children, he writes:—