The Life of Thomas Hardy
It attracted no notice whatever, and remained almost totally unknown until it was revived by the growing interest in Hardy's maturer work. It was practically inaccessible to English readers until the appearance of its second edition eighteen years later, although it had been reprinted in America. Copies of the three-volume first edition are to-day extremely rare.
Meredith again was interested in the rather dynamic, if crudely developed, "drive" of the narrative. He certainly had no further cause for complaint on the score of paucity of incident and plot. In another interview with Hardy he advised a lightening and brightening of tone-color.
This advice again took immediate effect. It resulted in the most pleasing idyl among all the Wessex novels, Under the Greenwood Tree, written after Hardy had definitely forsaken Weymouth and had returned to the inland villages of Dorset, where he could again feel himself to be the countryman born and bred. The full flavor of the countryside can be sensed in this story. It remains the most popular of the series, with the possible exception of Tess, probably because it is the least painful in its effects upon sensitive readers. It was greatly admired by both Tennyson and Browning. Its lightly sketched-in undertone of irony, which casts dun shadows over the concluding paragraphs particularly, went largely unnoticed.
From September, 1872, to July, 1873, Tinsley's Magazine ran a serial story called A Winning Tongue Had He. This narrative was then issued in three volumes, again by Tinsley Brothers, under the revised title, A Pair of
[156]
