The Life of Thomas Hardy
should be permitted to influence the full recognition of the facts themselves as such. Not until a view of life has actually been distilled from close observation, and fixed through insight and ratiocination, should it be employed in influencing the artistic selection, ordering, and presentation of impressions. Henry Knight comes to grief chiefly because of his failure to observe this principle:
The moral rightness of this man's life was worthy of all praise; hut in spite of some intellectual acumen, Knight had in him a modicum of that wrongheadedness which is mostly found in scrupulously honest people. With him, truth seemed too clean and pure an abstraction to be so hopelessly churned in with error as practical persons find it.
Hardy hinted that Shakespeare himself did not follow out the principle of "poetic justice" in Romeo and Juliet and Othello. King Lear and The Return of the Native are both great poetry and they are both true to life, but they both present a view of life that is not particularly appealing to the optimistic idealist and romantic.
The novelist's criticism of the subject matter and technique of fiction is found in its most concentrated form in the articles which he contributed to various periodicals between 1888 and 1891. In them he defended his sincere search for truth, accompanied by an attentive ear for the "still sad music of humanity" that ultimately makes all writing such as his own worth while. In this latter respect his aims differed from those of Zola and other purely scientific realists.
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