of land, with which he has an intimacy . . . old names, and old houses lingering in decay . . . pagan impulses, the spirit of material and natural religion, the wisdom and the simplicity, the blind and groping thoughts of a living peasantry still primitive. . . . He loves to contemplate the entrance of new social ways and forms, into a world of old social preference and tradition; to show how there is waged, all the land over, a conflict between street and field, factory and farm, or between the instincts of blood and the capacities of brain; to note how a little leaven of fresh learning may work havoc among the weighty mass of ancient, customary thought . . . to build up, touch by touch, stroke upon stroke, the tragedy of such collision, the comedy of such contrast, the gentle humour or the heartless satire of it all, watched and recorded by an observant genius."
Such passages, as sonorous as they are sympathetic, bring all of us to the deeper understanding of Hardy's work. But the book is even broader in scope, tracing the history of the English novel from the time of Defoe, and characterising with rare insight its different developments. "The modern novel," observes Johnson, "differs from its predecessors mainly in this: that it is concerned, not with the storm and stress of great, clear passions and emotions, but with the complication of them: there is a sense of entanglement. . . . Psychology, to use that ambitious term, supplies the novelist with studies and materials; not only the free and open aspect of life itself." A sense of entanglement! Could any other one phrase so aptly have summed up the strength and weakness of latter-day fiction, from George Meredith or George Eliot to Henry James?
It was characteristic of Lionel Johnson that his
