The Life of Thomas Hardy
middle-class tradesmen's ethics. Against her dire influence on the public taste and morals, only two voices could be heard, both faint: George Eliot's, fading out with Adam Bede, and George Meredith's, just becoming audible with The Ordeal of Richard Feverel—both sounding in the year of the publication of The Origin of Species.
The decade of the Sixties, then, was a period of agitated transition; everywhere the old order was evacuating its familiar citadels with tears and imprecations; it created vacua, drew after it turbulent and unresolved novelties. England itself was changing its countenance: from a feudal, agricultural, conservative state, it was shifting into a commercial, industrial, democratic nation. And realism was displacing sentimentality in thought and art, just as geology was displacing the literal interpretation of Genesis.
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From 1862 until 1867 Hardy lived at No. 16, Westbourne Park Villas, in the sluggishly beating heart of Bayswater respectability. Slowly he was emerging from his architectural shell, from his artistic chrysalis, and beginning to sniff with eagerness the tainted gales set up by the chaotic movements of those spacious days. Sentimentally, he was strongly attached to the good old society that was falling to bits everywhere; but vividly and intellectually he found himself yelping with the enthusiastic youthful pack. Thus his heart and his brain were at war in his soul.
This struggle manifested itself in his growing imp-
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