Mr. Hardy's New Novel.* M1r. Hardy's latest novel is his greatest. Amid his beloved Wessex valleys and uplands and among the unsophisticated folk in whose livas and labours we have learned from him to find un- suspected dignity and romance, he has founded a storv, daring in its treatment of conventional ideas, pathetic in its sadness, and profoundly stirring by its tragic power. Tho very title, " Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman," is a challenge to convention, tvhich denies the purity to tho girl who, while yet a child, has been entrapped in the net of a libertine-inquiring not whether her spirit as well as its hanitation has been corrupted. Again and again is the glove thrown dowvn. Thus of Angel Clare, tho parson's son who marries Tess and then discovers her secret, wve are told- With all his attempted independence of judgment, this advanced man was yet the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back into his surround- ings. No prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this young wife of hiis was as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any, other woman endowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral -alue Iaving to be reckoned, not by acuievement but by tendency. WVhat is to be said on the other side is obvious enough; but for the moment sympathy with Tess might make us forget that, unlike the novelist, the lover and the world at large are never able to turn the electric light upon the heart of the woman they are called upon to judge, and are forced to apply the rough test of results. It is well that an idealist like Mlr. Hardy should every now and then remind us how terribly defective are our means of judging others. But to pass to the tragedy of the story. The essonce of tragedy is the loss of happiness by a hair's-breadth; and how often in the course of the story is that fine margin all but overpassed! We tremble on the verge of safety when Tess determines to reveal her past to her lover and in the irony of fate he refuses to listen ; again when, on the eve of the Nvedding day, she thrusts a letter, telling all, beneath his bedroom door-but under the carpet; again wvhen she tramps all the -wav from Flintcomb Ash to appeal to the parson and his wife, who would have taken her to their hearts, and is daunted from her purpose by finding the household at church; again when she takes up pen to write to her husband, and lets it fall again when the letters she does write miscarry and so through the -whole gamut of misfortune to the catastrophe. Tess's is a character which in some respects, in its stoic patience, its fidelity, and its strength of love, is not unlike previous creations of Mr. Hardy's. The fatal neglect to be frank with her futuro husband, well-nigh unpar- donable in a woman armed with the in- stincts of a higher social grade, merely heightens our compassion for the country girl, who is .conscious, indeed, of a past " mis- fortune," but of no lapse from innocence; who is accustomed to see even real lapses condoned, and who, nevertheless, only just misses acting upon a higher conception of duty than is recog- nized by her mother and her own sphere of society. There is nothing in tho book that sets one's heart aching more than the scene on the evening of the marriage, when, her husband having confessed to .Tess some piece of boyish dissipation in London, she, in the simplicity of her heart, makes her counter-revelation, fondly imagining that it will be received as comparable in kind with his. But there is relief for seared emotions in the masterly setting of the tale. We live and move among the Dorset " work folk." Dairyman, huckster, farm-hand, man, woman, and child- they are all living, sentient characters, each with distinct mind, ambition, and dexterity, "w alking his individual way to dusty death." MIr. Hardy's own intimate appreciation of the sons of the soil gives force to his protest against lumping them under the appellation of" Heodge." To him each is a volume in which is bound up the sum of the thought and instincts of immemorial generations. Irn " Tess of the D'Urbervilles " he has seized upon tho fact that many humble rural families are the descendants of decayed houses ; and he uses the romance with consumnmato dramatic power. We know not whether to laugh or cry at the effect u-uon " Sir John " Durbeyfield of Pa'son T'ring- ham's indiscreet revelation of his knightly ancestry. When he was gone, Derbeyfield walked a few steps in a profoned reverie,:and then sat down upon the grassy bank by the roadside, depositing his basket before him. In a few minutes a youth appeared in the distance. *- Boy, take up that basket. I want 'ee to go on an errand for me." The lath-like stripling frowned. ' Who be you, then, John Dnrbeyfield, to order me about and call me * boy'? You know my name as well as I know years !" *' Do you, do you? That's the secret; that's the secret! . . . . Well, Fred, I don't miind telling you that the secret is that I'm one of a noble race- it has just been discovered by me this present after- noon, p.m." As ho made the announcement Durbey- field, decniing from his sitting position, luxuriously stretched himself out upon the bank among the daisies. The lad stood before Durbeyfield, and contemplated his length from crown to toe. *- Sir John D'Urberville-that's who I am," con- tinued the prostrate man. *- That is, if knights were baronets, which they be. 'Tis recorded in history all aboat me. Dost know, lad, of such a place as Kings- bere-sub-Greenhill ?" Yes, I've been there, to Greenhill Fair."- 'Well, under the church of that city . . . lie my ancestors-hundreds of 'em-in coats of mail and jewvels, in great lead coffins weighing tons and tons. There's not a man in the county of South wessex that's got grander and nobler skellingtons in his family than I." The boy, impressed by this grandeur and by the gift of a shilling, is sent off to the Pure Drop Inn for a horse and carriage to carry " Sir John" home. And when you've done that, go on .to my house with the basket, and tell .my wife to put away that washing, because she needn't finish it, and w-ait till I come home, as I've news to tell her." Y Yes, Sir John ; thank you. Anything else I can do for 'ee, Sir John?" - Tell 'em at home that I should like for supper,- well,lamb's fry if they can get it ; and if they can't, black-pot ; and if they can't get that, well, chitter- lings will do." And the next thing we see is the glorified huckster, entering the village triurphantly in a chaise be- longing to the Pure Drop, and driven by a frizzle- headed, brawiny damsel. Hle is leaning bach, -with his eyes closed luxuriously, singing in a slow re- citative, to the merriment of the spectators and the shame of his daughter- I've-got-a-great family vault at Kingsbere, "And-knighted-forefathers-in-lead-coffi.s-- there !" With more tragic circumstance is the memory oL those ancestors introduced when Tess, trapped and drugged, is to about to suffer her cruel un- doing. One may, indeed, admit the possibility of a re- tribution lurking in the catastrophe. Doubtless some of Tess D'Urberville's mailed ancestors rollicking home from a fray had dealt the same wrong even more ruthlessly upon peasant girls of their time. The craft of the field and the farm is described with a minute fidelity and a picturesqueness which sometimes approaches the idyllic, as in the scenes at Talbotliays Dairy ; and, in truth, the languishing love of the three dairymaids, bouncing MIarian, Izz Huett, and Retty Priddle for Angel Clare-how fond Mlr. Hardy is of whim- sical names !-may be thought somewhat too Arcadian. But as a rule Mr. Hlardy does not paint in idyllic colours ; he is too deeply tinged with the peasant's own fatalism and grim sense of fact. Viewing the lives of his " workfolk , "from a higher eminence than they occupy themselves, he feels the nobility of labour and makes us feel it too. But if his pictures sometimes throw a glamour over rustic industry and toil,they abound in reminders of its hard reality. In WVessex there are bleak uplands as well as rich vales ; Tal- bothays is balanced by Flintcoinb Ash-the " starve-acre " farm in which Tess serves a dreary term as field-labourcr and general farm- hand. Here is a passage in -which the sentiment transferred to canvas so -wonderfully by the I'rench painter Millet is exactly conveyed to our senses by a different medium _ The swede-field in which she and her companions were tet hacking was . a stretch of a bundred-odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground of the farm. rising above stony lanchets or lynchets-the ontcrop of giliceous veins in the chalk form-ation, composed of myriads of loose white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes. The upper half of each swede-turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the business of the two women to grab out the lower or earthy half of the root with a hooked fork called a * Tesa of the D'Urbervilles * A k'ure Woman." Fsithfully presented by Thomas Hardy. In 3 vols. OQsood. 71'vaine, and Co. hacker, that it might be eaten also. Every leaf of, the vegetable having already been consumed,the whole field was in colour a desolate drab it was a conm- t1exiOD without features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should te only an expanse of skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face looking down on thce brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over the surface of the former like flies. Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical regularity ; their forms en- shrouded in Hessian " wroppers "-sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to the bottom, to keep their gowns from blowing about-short skirts revealing boots that reached high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets. The pensive character which 'lie curtained hood lent to their bent heads would i ive reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of the two Marys. MR. HARDY'S NEW NOVEL.*