This article opens by citing some contemporary reviews and critical accounts (including Conrad's own) to show how (and why!) Conrad was commonly compared to Thomas Hardy by those people who then read him. Evidence that Conrad in fact had read Hardy's Tess of rhe d'UrberviZZes, and with deliberation and care adapted dramatic elements that struck him to form a crucial part of The Secret Agent, is considered. It is maintained that Conrad found much in Tess that was of use, often in the spirit of creative rejection. Key areas of both novels are closely examined, and Conrad's characteristic method of ironic tragedy is contrasted with Hardy's particular tragic emphases. Ultimately, the intention of this study is to place present assumptions about the nature of "Modernism" in a new light.
An unsigned review of The Secret Agent in the Glasgow News of 3 October 1907 contrasts the mood of Conrad's writing with that of the tragic Thomas Hardy: At the utmost there is a grave irony, or a faint tinge of melancholy, as of one brooding without resentment over the futility of human efforts and desires. But this is a new note in our literature -Hardy's sombre tragedy is something quite different. This astute immediate response to the striking originality of Conrad's novel appears to fit in with a general contemporary English attempt to place the mature, post-sea novel Conrad in the perspective of some recent, familiar English novelist. Hardy's later tragedies, such as The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'urbervilles and Jude the Obscure seemed to provide a natural reference-point for Conrad readers. C. E. Montague, reviewing Chance in the Manchester Guardian of 15 January 1914, compares Conrad with Tess, saying of the Dorset novelist: Mr Hardy likes to show the sufferers, by such tragic embarrassments [defined by Montague as "profound, incalculable troubling of the stream of experience, not by their fault"] in their isolation -to show, for instance, how little it mattered to anyone what mattered to Tess.
Richard Curle in his Joseph Conrad, A Study (1914) in his chapter 10 ("Conrad as Artist") makes an explicit contrast between the two writers:
Conrad again shows his artistic realism in the fact that his works are not overweighted with mechanical plots or impossible coincidences. No character can appear actual, when it is obvious from the first that its life has to fit into a preconceived dovetailing. Look at the d&ouement of a book like Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge -it is too absurdly