FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. Published in 1874, this novel has ever since been ranked among the greatest of Thomas Hardy's works. Although it possesses rather less tragic intensity than The Return of the Native,' it is on the whole a better-balanced book. And it is not without tragic power. The hopeless struggle of Fanny Robin against fate and malign chance, ending in that gasping, stagger ing journey to her death in the workhouse and the return of the thin coffin through the drip ping gloom, is instinct with pity and terror. But this is not the main portion of the book; and although the love affairs of Bathsheba Everdene with her three suitors, Troy, Bold wood and Gabriel Oak, likewise have a due portion of the sombre and the tragic, and ex hibit in their development more than traces of the typical Hardy philosophy of pessimism, nevertheless the book ends in the calm sun shine of well-earned happiness for the prin cipals. The characters are all in humble cir cumstances,— shepherds and small farmers, chiefly. But their fortunes are so recounted as to give them all of the significance and epic largeness of "sad stories of the death of kings' Various factors contribute to this end; among them, the genius with which Hardy reveals the fundamental. humanity of his characters, and
the skill with which he places his human pygmies against a background of nature so potent and so infinite in aspect as to reduce to pettiness the difference between peasants and world rulers. The author's minor rustics have often and deservedly been termed Shakespearean. Patient, shrewd, simple, rich in native humor, they are portrayed with unerring artistry. Add to these features structural perfection and varied and impressive stylistic achievement, and there results a novel superb in its compound of the comedy and tragedy of life, its elemental power:. falling short of the highest mainly in its occasional pessimistic distortion of truth. Various works may be consulted for a general presentation of Hardy as novelist; hut no crit icism' which is of outstanding importance is especially concerned with 'Far from the Mad ding Crowd.>