rm his lighter writings can be;
and in his more tragic work there is much that is true, terrifically
expressed. Yet he has got upon the wrong side of the world, and can
never see beyond the horror of its tragedy. Consequently in him we have
another form of paganism, not this time that which the seductive earth
with its charms is suggesting, but the hopeless paganism which sees the
earth only in its bitterness. In _The Return of the Native_ he says:
"What the Greeks only suspected we know well; what their Aeschylus
imagined our nursery children feel. That old-fashioned revelling in the
general situation grows less and less possible as we uncover the defects
of natural laws, and see the quandary man is in by their operation." It
is no wonder that he who expressed the spirit of the modern age in these
words should have closed his well-known novel with the bitter saying
that the upper powers had finished their sport with _Tess_. "To have
lost the God-like conceit that we may do what we will, and not to have
acquired a homely zest for doing what we can, shows a grandeur of temper
which cannot be objected to in the abstract, for it denotes a mind that,
though disappointed, forswears compromise." Here is obviously a man who
would love the highest if he saw it, who would fain welcome and proclaim
the ideals if he could only find them on the earth; but who has found
instead the bitterness of darkness, the sarcasm and the sensationalism
of an age that the gods have left. He is too honest to shout _pour
encourager les autres_ when his own heart has no hope in it; and his
greater books express the wail and despair of our modern paganism.

Breaking away from him and all such pessimistic voices came the glad
soul of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose old-fashioned revelling in the
situation is the exact counter-blast to Hardy's modernism, and is one of
those perennial human things which are ever both new and old. It is not
that Stevenson has not seen the other side of life. He has seen it and
he has suffered from it deeply, both in himself and in others; yet still
indomitably he "clings to his paddle." "I believe," he says, "in an
ultimate decency of things; ay, and if I woke in hell, should still
believe it."

Then there came the extraordinary spirit of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. At
first sight some things that he has written appear pagan enough, and
have been regarded as such. The God of Christians seems to inhabit and
preside over an amazin