The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge [antikvár]

THE WESSEX NOVELS One of the most marked characteristics of European hterature since the end of the eighteenth century has been the expression of what might be called a heightened sense of locality. The fact that Milton was a Londoner does not have much effect on our appreciation of Paradise Lost, but the fact that Wordsworth was a dalesman of the Lake Country is all-important for the understanding of The Prelude. Sir Walter Scott was the first great novelist to make use of this modern feeling for the character of places. In his Waverley Novels he produced a body of prose fiction which is not only a series of great and moving stories, but also a complete portraiture of the Scotland tliat he knew and loved so well. The achievement of Scott in this respect has only once been rivalled in Great Britain since his time. A service similar to that which he performed for the Scottish Lowlands in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was rendered by Thomas Hardy to certain parts of rural England rather more than a half a century later. The Wessex Novels of Thomas Hardy are the only " local " novels that can be compared with the Waverley Novels for richness and variety, for sincerity and strength, for moral and imaginative power. And profoundly as they differ in the method of their art and in the general outlook of their authors, the Waverley Novels and the Wessex Novels resemble each other in the fact that both Scott and Hardy solved the difficult problem of expressing the spirit of a locality without lapsing into a narrow provincialism. The creator of Jeanie Deans and the creator of Tess Durbeyfield by their profound and sympathetic understanding of the local and the IX