they are young. The changes and chances of this mortal life
mellow them into a more neutral tint. Their revenge upon life grows
less personal and more objective as they get older. They become
balanced and resigned. They attain "the wisdom of Sophocles."

The opposite of this has been the history of Mr. Hardy's progression.
He began with quite harmless rustic realism, fanciful and quaint.
Then came his masterpieces wherein the power and grandeur of a
great artist's inspiration fused everything into harmony. At the last,
in his third period, we have the exaggeration of all that is most
personal in his emotion intensified to the extreme limit.

It is absurd to turn away from these books, books like Jude the
Obscure and the Well-Beloved. If Mr. Hardy had not had such
sardonic emotions, such desire to "hit back" at the great "opposeless
wills," and such Goblin-like glee at the tricks they play us, he would
never have been able to write "Tess." Against the ways of God to
this sweet girl he raises a hand of terrible revolt, but it is with more
than human "pity" that he lays her down on the Altar of Sacrifice.

But, after all, it is in the supreme passages of pure imaginative
grandeur that Mr. Hardy is greatest. Here he is "with Shakespeare"
and we forget both Titan and Goblin. How hard it is exactly to put
into words what this "imaginative grandeur" consists of! It is, at any
rate, an intensification of our general consciousness of the
Life-Drama as a whole, but this, under a poetic, rather than a scientific,
light, and yet with the scientific facts,--they also not without their
dramatic significance--indicated and allowed for. It is a clarifying of
our mental vision and a heightening of our sensual apprehension. It
is a certain withdrawing from the mere personal pull of our own fate
into a more rarified air, where the tragic beauty of life falls into
perspective, and, beholding the world in a clear mirror, we escape
for a moment from "the will to live."

At such times it is as though, "taken up upon a high mountain, we
see, without desire and without despair, the kingdoms of the world
and the glories of them." Then it is that we feel the very wind of the
earth's revolution, and the circling hours touch us with a palpable
hand.

And the turmoil of the world grown so distant, it is then that we feel
at once the greatness of humanity and the littleness of what it strives
for. We are seized with a shuddering tenderness for M