The Life of Thomas Hardy
to his recognized insight into the workings of the human heart. That he possessed no mean power of psychological analysis of motives is shown by many a passage in his very first novels. Sometimes his expression of a quite common and simple observation could be altogether delightful in its simplicity, as when
Dick wondered how it was that when people were married they could be so blind to romance; and was quite certain that if he ever took to wife that dear impossible Fancy, he and she would never be so dreadfully practical and undemonstrative of their passion as his father and mother were. The most extraordinary thing was, that all the fathers and mothers he knew were just as undemonstrative as his own.
More subtle analysis is seen in the following:
There exists as it were an outer chamber of the mind, in which, when a man is occupied centrally with the most momentous question of his life, casual and trifling thoughts are just allowed to wander softly for an interval, before being banished altogether.
Despite his constant and consistent aim at truth to life, he departed, at the outset of his career, from the rock-bound principles of the stricter Naturalists, in his advocation of the principles of the necessary selection and artistic ordering of the facts of life as observed, in order to reproduce, as the resultant effect, the writer's personal interpretation of the ultimate significance, or non-significance, of things in general. Thus we find him in full accord with the most famous novelist of the English Romanticists in the motto he prefixed to Desperate Remedies:
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