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Not until eleven years later, after he had given promise of success in this profession, did Thomas Hardy write his first novel, The Poor Man and The Lady. This fell into the hands of an intelligent publisher's reader, the later famed George Meredith, who returned it promptly because it lacked plot. Desperate Remedies desperately remedied this defect, but supplanted it with many others. Under the Greenwood Tree attracted more favorable notice, and in 1874 the Cornhill Magazine published anonymously Far from the Madding Crowd. Its enormous success was in part due to the fact that many painfully unobservant readers attributed it to famed George Eliot, whose works it resembled in certain details. In 1891, before literary England had properly heard of George Bernard Shaw, before Oscar Wilde was a bad name, before ten final absurd years had burned up in a bright sputter for the end of a smoldering century, Thomas Hardy had written Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the most famous of all his fine, austere, tempestuous novels. Four years later he had written Jude the Obscure, the saddest, the last.*
Like many another man who has written fiction, Thomas Hardy had first fashioned verses. Done with prose before he was 60, he returned to poetry, but not with the weak dilettantism of a used-up writer who wished to knot up the last frayed edges of his thought. In his verse† he states more succinctly, more bitterly the angry, scornful, rebellion with which he regarded the dismal riddle of existence. The terse wrinkled lines of his poetry are like those of his small face in their expression of quiet pessimism, of a thoughtful, stoic sorrow. His "Epitaph on a Pessimist'' is a flippant quatrain:<BR> I'm Smith of Stoke, aged sixty-odd,<BR> I've lived without a dame<BR> From youth-time on; and would to God<BR> My dad had done the same.
A consensus of critical opinions, had it been taken a month ago, would probably have given Author Thomas Hardy the first place among modern English prose writers, perhaps the same position among English poets. There have, on the other hand, always been those critics who inveigh against the less graceful than sturdy power of Author Hardy's fictions. Famed Author George Moore found Hardy's writing almost without merit.
Despite the faults which captious critics have discovered in his writings, the fame of Author Hardy has never wavered or grown thin. While other authors have been hailed, forgotten, rediscovered, his honor has had a steady, splendid growth. Perhaps there is a rocky artifice in his style, a misfit melodrama in the way he arranges a thunderstorm to enlarge the climax of every tragedy, a false fatality in the coincidence that so often generates his plots. But these faults are rooted in deeper virtues: an intense sincerity, unconcerned with merely literary effects, a profound, pitying pessimism, a relentless humanism that condemns the disorderly dieties who make men's lives sterile and without joy. There is also the scope, the inclusiveness that permits him to deal with large effects, to call, in the sweeping vigorous lines of The Dynasts, for Napoleon's army to appear upon the stage.