In "The Waiting Supper" there is one line that is as great a pathetic fallacy as the more familiar and cheery kind which represents nature as smiling upon the lovers. Hardy's lovers have to submit to this: "Thus the sad autumn afternoon waned, while the waterfall hissed sarcastically of the inevitableness of the unpleasant." Did you ever hear a waterfall like that? The only waterfalls I have heard quote Darwin and discuss the election returns. I know that the happy poet is a liar when he says that the nightingale is celebrating my love for Mamie, for the nightingale is concerned with other matters. But as between a nightingale who is sympathetic with my emotions and a sarcastic waterfall, I prefer the nightingale. And I do not like either in realistic fiction.
Thomas Hardy, the idol of the younger realists and the liberator of British fiction from the Victorian hoopskirt and the happy ending, is not a realist. He is a great romantic, with a taste for pretty girls, moonlight, heroes and dragoons. He is incurably superstitious. He is pained by many modern things, especially by modern restorations of ancient buildings. He takes Tess to the Druidical stones on Salisbury Plain because he dearly likes that kind of moonlit antiquity. His pronominal substitution of It for He does not achieve a revolution in theology. He manages the destinies of human folk as arbitrarily as any maker of fiction that ever lived. But he never made a story in which he did not convince you that life is overwhelmingly interesting and that nature, girls, and dragoons are beautiful if sad things to contemplate.
Any book about George Borrow is worth reading. The two volumes by Dr. Knapp are forbiddingly dense with documentary minutiæ, yet it is a pleasure to loaf through them at least once. Borrow's burly personality makes itself felt in the driest philological note and vitalizes the pages even of a commonplace critic, as, indeed, it vitalizes many flatly ordinary pages in his extraordinary books. Mr. Clement K. Shorter's "George Borrow and His Circle" is interesting because it is about Borrow and not in the least because it is by Mr. Shorter. Mr. Shorter's declared ambition was to write a book that should appeal not to "Borrovians," but to "a wider public which knows not Borrow."