hrough keyholes. In him, wide wanderings
have produced the narrow mind, and an Empire has become as petty a thing
as the hoard in a miser's garret. Many of his poems are simply miser's
shrieks when the hoard seems to be threatened. He cannot even praise the
flag of his country without a shrill note of malice:--

Winds of the world, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro--
And what should they know of England who only England know?
The poor little street-bred people, that vapour, and fume, and brag,
They are lifting their heads in the stillness, to yelp at the English flag!

Mr. Kipling is a good judge of yelping.

The truth is, Mr. Kipling has put the worst of his genius into his
poetry. His verses have brazen "go" and lively colour and something of
the music of travel; but they are too illiberal, too snappish, too
knowing, to afford deep or permanent pleasure to the human spirit.

XXVII

MR. THOMAS HARDY

1. HIS GENIUS AS A POET

Mr. Thomas Hardy, in the opinion of some, is greater as a poet than as a
novelist. That is one of the mild heresies in which the amateur of
letters loves to indulge. It has about as much truth in it as the
statement that Milton was greater as a controversialist than as a poet,
or that Lamb's plays are better than his essays. Mr. Hardy has
undoubtedly made an original contribution to the poetry of his time. But
he has given us no verse that more than hints at the height and depth of
the tragic vision which is expressed in _Jude the Obscure_. He is not by
temperament a singer. His music is a still small voice unevenly matched
against his consciousness of midnight and storm. It is a flutter of
wings in the rain over a tomb. His sense of beauty is frail and
midge-like compared with his sense of everlasting frustration. The
conceptions in his novels are infinitely more poetic than the
conceptions in his verse. In _Tess_ and _Jude_ destiny presides with
something of the grandeur of the ancient gods. Except in _The Dynasts_
and a few of the lyrics, there is none of this brooding majesty in his
verse. And even in _The Dynasts_, majestic as the scheme of it is, there
seems to me to be more creative imagination in the prose passages than
in the poetry.

Truth to tell, Mr. Hardy is neither sufficiently articulate nor
sufficiently fastidious to be a great poet. He does not express life
easily in beautiful words or in images. There is scarcely a magical
image in the hundred o