The Life of Thomas Hardy
"Mr. Kipling? . . ."
"Rudyard Kipling, the famous Indian balladist."
"Rudyard Kipling? . . ."
The woman had never heard of him, so Kipling himself carried on:
"But this is Mr. Hardy."
"Mr. Hardy ? . . ."
"Thomas Hardy, the great Wessex novelist."
"Thomas Hardy . . . Wessex? . . "
She had never heard of either of them. This happened in the present century. Such is the fame of even successful littérateurs.
The record for Hardy's next two decades can be little more than an annotated catalogue:
1880: The Trumpet-Major, the most genial of the novels; the first evidence of the growing hold which the Napoleonic legend was assuming over the author.
1881: A Laodicean, dictated through a wearisome illness of six months, to a predetermined happy ending, featuring architecture, designed to appeal to less mature readers, particularly youngsters into whose souls the iron had not yet entered.
1882: Two on a Tower; the lonely lives of a boy-astronomer and an indiscreet lady of quality, projected against a stellar background.
1886: The Mayor of Casterbridge, the profound effect of Biblical influences—a simple, headstrong character, relentlessly pursued to his doom by a Nemesis at once drawn out of the Old Testament and Greek tragedy.
1887: The Woodlanders, German idealistic philosophy,
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