does in his novels-I have observed that they eye it suspiciously, restively; they would be undetected in their devices, hate instinctively that which shows their secret ways of power at work under show of servility. Hardy, their champion, would break down the servility: and they distrust him for it. Well-and though they be ungrateful—perhaps their instinct is true and his is a childless creed: and for men, though it be manly to face it out and test it, an unhopeful creed. For women it must be certainly unpromising to read the doctrine of Jude the Obscure, which works out to this, that man's aspirations to make the world better are chiefly clogged by the flesh, and that flesh is woman. To man it can scarcely be less heartening to be barred with the question Has some Vast Imbecility, Mighty to build and blend, But impotent to tend, Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry? Or come we of an Automaton Unconscious of our pains? Or are we live remains Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye Well, when it comes to this, I for one can only answer that, if it were, we must yet carry on somehow, sing a song on the raft we cannot steer, keep a heart of sorts, and share out the rations to the women and children. But that word recalls me. It is a childless creed. It has no more evidence than Meredith's: intellectually viewed, I find them equal: but Meredith has hope, hope for the young: and I must put my money on hope. VII Further, when I consider, these poems-as those novels -crowd the sardonic laughter of the gods too thickly. There is irony enough in life, God wot: but here is a man possessed with it. All men, all stories, tramp with him to his titles Life's Little Ironies, Satires of Circumstance, Time's Laughing Stocks1. So one hesitates and asks: Is life, after all, a parish full of bad practical jokes? Is catholic man like this? No: as we take up poem after poem in which human loves and aspirations find themselves thwarted, set astray, or butting against some door that, having opened a glimpse of paradise, shuts by some power idiotically mischievous if not malignant-shuts with a click of the latch and a chuckle of mocking laughter-we tell ourselves, "These things happen: but in any such crowd they never and in no life happen.' And while we debate this, Hardy confounds us, spreading out his irony upon one grand ironic drama, The Dynasts. I suppose The Dynasts to be—and I shall not allow for 1 Why, O why will authors choose loose, woolly, undescriptive titles? To take another writer of genius, why Traffics and Discoveries, Life's Handicap, Many Inventions, The Day's Work? And, to return to Hardy, what differentiates an Irony of Life from a Satire of Circumstance, and do not both equally make the victim a Laughing Stock of Time? And if there be a difference, are the poems divided by the titles based on any fundamentum divisionis? And, anyhow, what is wrong with The Iliad, King Lear, Don Quixote, John Gilpin, Tom Jones, David Copperfield? What is right with The Eternal Mystery, Some Emotions and a Moral, and so on? Are they not all too loose for their contents? And what is wrong again with a house-The House with the Seven Gables, Bleak House, The House with the Green Shutters, The House of Usher, A Doll's House, The House that Jack Built? rival Doughty's noble but remote, morose, almost Chinese, epic, The Dawn in Britain (this, too, a product of a man well past meridian)-I suppose The Dynasts to be the grandest poetic structure planned and raised in England in our time. In the soar and sweep of that drama the poetwhom, a moment ago, we were on the point of accusing for provincial, lays Europe beneath us 'flat, as to an eagle's eye' a map with little things in multitudes, ants in armies, scurrying along the threads which are roads, violently agitated in nodules which are cities. But let me quote one or two of Hardy's own stage directions and thereby not only save myself the vain effort to do what has been perfectly done for me, but send you, if you would practise the art of condensed and vivid description, to models as good as can be found in English prose. Imagine yourselves, then, an audience aloft and listening to the talk of such Spirits as watch over human destinies. The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and the branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau of Spain forming a head. Broad and lengthy lowlands stretch from the north of France across Russia like a grey-green garment hemmed by the Ural mountains and the glistening Arctic Ocean. The point of view then sinks downward through space, and draws near to the surface of the perturbed countries, where the people,...are seen writhing, crawling, heaving, and vibrating, in their various cities and nationalities. (A picture of Europe today.) Then A new and penetrating light descends on the spectacle, enduing men and things with a seeming transparency, and exhibiting as one organism the anatomy of life and movement in all humanity and vitalized matter included in the display. So the focus slides down and up and again down: it narrows on the British House of Commons, or on a village green, or on a bedroom in a palace: it expands to sweep the field of Austerlitz. I ask you to turn for yourselves to one marvellous scene of a cellar, full of drunken deserters, looking out on the snow-tormented road along which straggles the army of Sir John Moore and struggles for Coruña....But here is a passage in the retreat from Moscow: What has floated down from the sky upon the Army is a flake of snow. Then come another and another, till natural features, hitherto varied with the tints of autumn, are confounded, and all is phantasmal grey and white. The caterpillar shape still creeps laboriously nearer: but instead of increasing in size by the rules of perspective, it gets more attenuated, and there are left upon the ground behind it minute parts of itself, which are speedily flaked over, and remain as white pimples by the wayside. Pines rise mournfully on each side of the nearing object.... Endowed with enlarged powers of audition as of vision, we are struck by the mournful taciturnity that prevails. Nature is mute. Save for the incessant flogging of the wind-broken and lacerated horses there are no sounds. The diction of the poem itself seldom rises to match its conception. In the rustic scenes we get that incomparable prose, nervous, and vernacular, yet Biblical, which Hardy has made out of his native dialect: but the major human characters talk in verse which is often too prosy, and the watching Spirits attain but spasmodically to the height of their high argument. Their lips are not touched by any such flame as kindles (for example) the lips of the watching Spirits in Prometheus Unbound. But we must not judge a poem of The Dynasts' range and scope apart from its tota impression: and that, in The Dynasts is tremendous. And I at this moment am committing a deadly artistic sin against proportion in attempting to talk of it in a part of a lecture. It should have two lectures to itself. As for its philosophy, one naturally compares it with that of Tolstoy's great novel War and Peace. But whereas Tolstoy and Hardy both see Napoleon as a puppet under Heaven-as Plato pronounces Man to be 'at his best a noble plaything for the gods'-the one, being Russian and an idealist, sees the little great man's ends shaped by a Divinity, watching over Sion, having purpose: the other, a most honest pessimist, can detect no purpose, or no beneficent one. For all he can see, God works-if He work -a magnipotent Will, but Like a knitter drowsed, Since life first was; and ever will so weave. And there for today we must leave it. VIII I fall back, to conclude, upon Wessex; appropriately, I think, upon a churchyard in a corner there, where kinsmen, friends, neighbours, mingle their dust; where, as Hardy's friend and homelier predecessor put it, The zummer aïr o' theäs green hill 'V a-heav'd in bosoms now all still. Faithful to this dust, to ancestry, old associations, the Nescio quâ natale solum dulcedine cunctos |