AN OLYMPIAN PASSES

With the death of Thomas Hardy the chain connecting the Victorian and modern literary worlds is broken, for he was undoubtedly the strongest remaining link. The contemporary of such literary gods as Tennyson, the Brownings, Dickens, Thackeray, Troilope, Charles Reade, Lytton, Rosetti, Morris, Ruskin, Meredith, and Swinburne, his quiet passing away after a month's illness seems almost an event of some past year, a happening around which the shadows have already closed. For to those readers who have come under the spell of "Far from the Madding Crowd," "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," and "The Return of the Native" their author cannot be reconciled with contemporary life and manners. The halo of fame hovering about his name is as venerable as it might well be with a hundred years or so behind it, and the gathering of this shy, shrinking, self-effacing little man to his fathers comes almost as an aftermath to a career which has reached the pinnacle of fame. It is almost ironical that Thomas Hardy, whose name will in time probably stand at the head of the list of his eminent contemporaries, should outlive them all. Furthermore, it is strange that an author whose "classic pessimism" is his outstanding characteristic should outlast his own age and live to a comfortable and happy senility in a generation whose chaos might justify his pessimism.

However, to anyone who has finished a volume of Hardy, his death comes as something more than a news event. When one recalls the vivid and deep impression indelibly left upon the mind by his masterly novels and the awe and admiration felt for the author the loss becomes a personal one. For while Thomas Hardy in real life might be described as retiring and shy, his dominating philosophy of life and strength of character move through his works of prose and poetry like the spirit of the storm and the whirlwind. And, although gathered to Olympian heights to join the immortals, he leaves a monument of colossal magnitude and superb achievement to all posterity.