The Novelist (1870-1898)
dance at the "gypsying" in The Return of the Native, for instance, is conceived as one of the most powerful influences that attract Eustacia and Wildeve to each other, and to their own destruction. It is at Paula's first dance that Somerset discovers his affection for her, and it is by his reckless dancing at Etretat that he draws her to him, repentant. The excitement of the dance leads the two Hardcome cousins to exchange life-partners on the eve of their weddings, which rash decisions bring on their inevitable tragic consequences. Mop Ollamoor steals back his child by forcing the unfortunate Carline to dance herself to exhaustion under the influence of the seductive strains of his fiddle. Dancing, even in its more refined forms, was viewed by Hardy less as an esthetic phenomenon, or as an art in the stricter sense, than as a purely physio-psychological phenomenon which carries with it certain ethical considerations.
Before attempting to distill from his writings Hardy's ideas on the function and practice of the art of poetry itself, it might he well to observe the actual extent of his acquaintance with the literature of all times, with the aim of discovering his qualifications as a critic of his own chosen art. In the first place, it will be noticed that he displayed a remarkable, it might almost be said, a phenomenal, familiarity with that fountain-head of forcible and beautiful expression, the Bible. His books are full, not only of quotations from the King James Version, but of innumerable less tangible echoes of the fine old Biblical phraseology—turns of phrase that might have been conceived by the Psalmist. In his very first novel, the references run practically all through the Old Testa-
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