They'd be playing some game,
perhaps. I would stalk into the room, book in hand, and sit them down
by the fire. "You're going to read us about the dog again?" they would
wail. "Well, not right away," I'd say. "I'll read something funny to
start with." This didn't much cheer them. "Oh, please don't read us
about the dog, please don't," they'd beg, "we're playing run-around."
When I opened the book they'd begin crying 'way in advance, long before
that stanza came describing his last dying howl.

It was kind of mean of me.

There's a famous old author, though, who's been doing just that all his
life. He's eighty years old, and still at it. I mean Thomas Hardy. Dying
howls, of all kinds, are his specialty.

His critics have assumed that from this they can infer his philosophy.
They say he believes that "sorrow is the rule and joy the exception,"
and that "good-will and courage and honesty are brittle weapons" for us
to use in our defense as we pass through such a world.

I'm not sure that I agree that that's Hardy's philosophy. It's fair
enough to say that Hardy's stories, and still more his poems, paint
chiefly the gloomy and hopeless situations in life, just as Mark Twain
and Aristophanes painted the comic ones. But Mark Twain was very far
from thinking the world was a joke, and I doubt whether Hardy regards
it at heart as so black.

He has written--how many books? twenty odd?--novels and poems. They make
quite an edifice. They represent long years of work. Could he have been
so industrious if he had found the world a chamber of horrors? He might
have done one or two novels or poems about it, but how could he have
kept on if he had truly felt the whole thing was hopeless? He kept on,
because although sorrows move him he does not feel their weight. He
found he could have a good time painting the world's tragic aspects. He
is somehow or other so constituted that that's been his pleasure. And he
has wanted his own kind of pleasure, just as you and I want our kinds.
That's fair.

I like to think that the good old soul has had a lot of fun all his
life, describing all the gloomiest episodes a person could think of. If
a good, gloomy episode comes into his mind while he's shaving, it
brightens the whole day, and he bustles off to set it down, whistling.

Somebody once asked him if he were as pessimistic as his writings would
indicate, and he replied that it wasn't safe to judge a man's thoughts
by his writings. His writ