The Novelist (1870-1898)
whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his verse is tonic and breezy gets his authority for speaking of 'Nature's holy plan.'"
As a sincere disciple of realism Hardy aimed always to give "a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and customs" of the characters he created. This picture of humanity as it really is he framed in a nature-setting that was the result of the closest and sharpest observation, refined and interpreted by the deepest possible insight. But he was not merely a realistic photographer of scenes and impressions. His essentially romantic insight often enabled him to pierce through the surface of the material things and invest them with a personality that is often more striking and more vividly presented than the human agents. Egdon Heath is of course the supreme example of this, but to the discerning reader the rural fragrance of Under the Greenwood Tree, the cliff and the storm in A Pair of Blue Eyes, the lonely observatory surrounded by the eversighing pines in Two on a Tower, and the ancient Roman amphitheatre in The Mayor of Casterbridge, are dramatis personæ whose distinctive qualities linger in the mind long after many of the human characters have faded out of memory. If the essential Romantic is, in the words of Lawrence Gilman, "he, who, piercing the illusory veil of material fact, reveals to us, through symbol and imagery, the enduring soul of wonder and enchantment which inhabits the world," then Hardy is, at least in his treatment of the external world, an essential Romantic.
His greatness as a novelist is probably due, however,
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