Original Sins

The cow and the horse tracks in the road were full of water, the rain having been enough to charge them, but not enough to wash them away. Across these minute pools the reflected stars flitted in a quick transit as she passed; she would not have known they were shining overhead if she had not seen them there - - the vastest things of the universe imaged in objects so mean.

     --Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee shall hate; 

Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate. 

For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain; 

And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain. 

     --Atalanta in Calydon, Swinburne

Well, appearances may be deceiving (and usually are when it comes to the first phase of romantic love), and sin, like equality, when portioned out may fall in unjust measure, particularly when it comes to the male and the female of the species - - sin being more sinful and equality less equal where the woman is the object. These are the dynamics at play in Tess of D'Urbervilles. 

It is a rather slow novel, and often needlessly so, as Hardy by the time he wrote this later novel had become enamored with naturalism, a school of literature particularly popular in the late 19th and early 20th century and known for such literary midgets as Theodore Dreiser and Hamlin Garland. Gone with the wind, those two. Happily however Hardy does retain a special talent, so ingeniously conceived in his earlier works, for interweaving nature and setting with character and narrative, and thus keeps his head well above the shallower efforts of others. At the same time, it is my feeling that he loses focus in many passages of this novel, and rather than working a magic of clean strokes and swift sleight of hand, gets too often stuck in a quicksand of mere nature, impressive for its detail but tedious for its delay of the tale. The story has finally picked up pace at around page 200, but too late I think to rank with the other three Hardy novels I have recently spoken of here.