This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil
''Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your immediate feelings...'' Adam Bede (1859)
An excellent story-teller, intense and skilful
Thomas Hardy's only historical novel, The Trumpet-Major, is set in Wessex during the Napoleonic Wars.