The Puissant Imagination of Thomas Hardy: An Obituary Published by "The Guardian" in 1928

The death of Mr. Thomas Hardy deprives the art of the letters in England of its unquestionable head. He towered over other writers of fiction like a column, and there was something columnar in the massive grace of his work, in the solid and slowly laid basis of observation and thinking.
For he was one of the least freakish of writers, one of the least dependent upon any separable ornaments of wit, eloquence, and melody. He would keep a book low, as painters say, in tone, denying himself the use of the easier lures that an expert writer has at his command. All the time he would be creating in your mind, as by some minute process of molecular change, a state of feeling upon which the climax would impinge with a tremendous and unexpected momentum.
A book like "Tess of the D'Urbevilles" or "Jude the Obscure" invades your spirit like a wonderfully organized and handled army: each separate movement of an advancing column may seem trivial and isolated in itself, but there comes a time when you realize that every avenue of feeling in you has been occupied, and the forces which seemed scattered and slender are combined as if by magic to overwhelm you. To no tragic novelist do we surrender more completely at the last.

Hardy came to feel that the world was infested with irresponsible bafflings of the brave wit and the warm heart, with now a fantastic series of crushing blows at the least defended, and now a grim visiting of some trivial fault or mistake with consequence of an extravagant ferocity.
He was one of the most compassionate of all writers; his description of the wounded pheasants bleeding to death after a day's shooting is ineffaceable from the memory; his sympathy seemed even to reach to the lives of the cattle, long dead, whose shoulders had polished the wood of the byre; and, behind, the matter-of-fact description of Tess at her field work, after her calamity, you feel a kind of agony of helplesss tenderness in the writer for all souls so troubled.
Hardy has given [English readers] their rights in rural Dorsetshire for ever--the massive modelling of its heath, the flood-tide and ebb of sap in its woodlands and orchards. On the life of all these he looked with the vehemently delighting eye and heart of a mighty artist.
He who hopes, loves and looks forward will read all that Hardy has written and come away the richer at the heart for drinking at a fountain of pity so deep, and the stronger in mind for contact with the glorious energies of so puissant an imagination.

The Guardian, January 12 1928