f frustrated lovers. At least half
his poems, I fancy, are poems of frustration. And they, hold us under
the spell of reality like a tragedy in a neighbour's house, even when
they leave us most mournful over the emptiness of the world. One can see
how very mournful Mr. Hardy's genius is if one compares it with that of
Browning, his master in the art of the dramatic lyric. Browning is also
a poet of frustrated lovers. One can remember poem after poem of his
with a theme that might easily have served for Mr. Hardy--_Too Late,
Cristina, The Lost Mistress, The Last Ride Together, The Statue and the
Bust_, to name a few. But what a sense of triumph there is in Browning's
tragedies! Even when he writes of the feeble-hearted, as in _The Statue
and the Bust_, he leaves us with the feeling that we are in the presence
of weakness in a world in which courage prevails. His world is a place
of opulence, not of poverty. Compare _The Last Ride Together_ with Mr.
Hardy's _The Phantom Horsewoman_, and you will see a vast energy and
beauty issuing from loss in the one, while in the other there is little
but a sad shadow. To have loved even for an hour is with Browning to
live for ever after in the inheritance of a mighty achievement. To have
loved for an hour is, in Mr. Hardy's imagination, to have deepened the
sadness even more than the beauty of one's memories.

Not that Mr. Hardy's is quite so miserable a genius as is commonly
supposed. It is false to picture him as always on his knees before the
grave-worm. His faith in beauty and joy may be only a thin flame, but it
is never extinguished. His beautiful lyric, _I Look into my Glass_, is
the cry of a soul dark but not utterly darkened:--

I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say: "Would God, it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!"

For then, I, undistrest,
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

That is certainly worlds apart from the unquenchable joy of Browning's
"All the breath and the bloom of the world in the bag of one bee"; but
it is also far removed from the "Lo! you may always end it where you
will" of _The City of Dreadful Night_. And despair is by no means
triumphant in what is perhaps the most attractive of all Mr. Hardy's
poems, _T