Read _Books Which Have
Influenced Me_, _A Gossip on Romance_ and _Talk and Talkers_. They are
unsurpassed for thought and feeling and for brilliancy of style.
But above everything looms the man himself--a chronic invalid, who
might well have pleaded his weakness and constant pains as an excuse
for idleness and railings against fate. Stoic courage in the strong is
a virtue, but how much greater the cheerful courage that laughs at
sickness and pain! Stevenson writing in a sickbed stories and essays
that help one to endure the blows of fate is a spectacle such as this
world has few to offer. So the man's life and work have come to be a
constant inspiration to those who are faint-hearted, a call to arms of
all one's courage and devotion.
THOMAS HARDY AND HIS TRAGIC TALES OF WESSEX
GREATEST LIVING WRITER OF ENGLISH FICTION--BECAUSE OF
RESENTMENT OF HARSH CRITICISMS THE PROSE MASTER TURNS TO
VERSE.
No one will question the assertion that Thomas Hardy is the greatest
living English writer of fiction, and the pity of it is that a man
with so splendid an equipment for writing novels of the first rank
should have failed for many years to give the world any work in the
special field in which he is an acknowledged master. Hardy seems to
have revolted from certain harsh criticism of his last novel, _Jude
the Obscure_, and to have determined that he would write no more
fiction for an unappreciative world.
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