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Why, I met a girl at that dance I went to in London the other evening, who told me she wasn't allowed to read a book called Tess of the D'Urbervilles, that I'd read myself, and that seemed to me one of which every young girl and married woman in England ought to be given a copy. It was the one true book I had seen in your country.
Much of the Gita Govinda's power arises from the endowment of Nature with romantic ardour, the forest itself being presented as a highly sensitive and symbolic setting for the behaviour of lovers. The following passage from Tess of the D'Urbervilles is perhaps the nearest approach in English to this kind of treatment.
Under the hill, and just ahead of them, was the half-dead townlet of their pilgrimage, Kingsbere, where lay those ancestors of whom her father had spoken and sung to painfulness: Kingsbere, the spot of all spots in the world which could be considered the d'Urbervilles' home, since they had resided there for full five hundred years.
In an access of hunger for his good opinion she bethought herself of what she had latterly endeavoured to forget, so unpleasant had been its issues the identity of her family with that of the knightly d'Urbervilles.
The descendants of these bygone owners felt it almost as a slight to their family when the house which had so much of their affection, had cost so much of their forefathers' money, and had been in their possession for several generations before the d'Urbervilles came and built here, was indifferently turned into a fowl-house by Mrs Stoke-d'Urberville as soon as the property fell into hand according to law.
I have talked with many educated people who confessed to having been profoundly influenced by such books as Eliot's "Adam Bede," Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter," Goethe's "Faust," Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles."
Part of the manor came to the Turbervilles, or d'Urbervilles, of Mr. Hardy's romance. The church, restored in 1875 by Street, is a fine building, mostly Perpendicular with some Norman remains. Particularly noteworthy is the grand old roof of the nave with its gorgeously coloured and gilt figures, also the ancient pews and Transitional font.
The intellectual power and the artistic skill which have been shown in the long series that has followed The Ordeal of Richard Feverel; the freshness and charm of the earlier, the strenuous workmanship and original handling of the later, novels of the author of Far from the Madding Crowd and of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, simply disable off-hand the judgment of the critic and in fact annul his jurisdiction if he fails to admire them; while in some cases universal, in many general, in all considerable and not trivial delight has been given by them to generations of novel readers.
Later, Thomas Hardy has given us Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Here is a protest, a redressing of the balance, by an advocate who rises to supply a side of the case which has been ignored. Yet once again Truth is violated, and by her sworn servant; for the world that Hardy portrays is not the world as it is. When Dickens makes Mr.
Hardy has put into that line and a half from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which he placed on the title-page of Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Poor wounded name, my bosom as a bed Shall lodge thee! In the use to which he put these words Mr. Hardy may be said to have added to the poetry of Shakespeare. He gave them a new imaginative context, and poured his own heart into them.
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