d in
soldiers, but that is more because they have added a touch of colour to
the tragic game of life than because he is on the side of the military
show. One has only to read _The Dynasts_ along with _Barrack-room
Ballads_ to see that the attitude of Mr. Hardy to war is the attitude of
the brooding artist in contrast with that of the music-hall politician.
Not that Mr. Kipling did not tell us some truths about the fate of our
fellows, but he related them to an atmosphere that savoured of beer and
tobacco rather than of eternity. The real world to Mr. Hardy is the
world of ancient human things, in which war has come to be a hideous
irrelevance. That is what he makes emphatically clear in _In the Time of
the Breaking of Nations_:--

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch grass:
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by;
War's annals will fade into night
Ere their story die

It may be thought, on the other hand, that Mr. Hardy's poems about war
are no more expressive of tragic futility than his poems about love.
Futility and frustration are ever-recurring themes in both. His lovers,
like his soldiers, rot in the grave defeated of their glory. Lovers are
always severed both in life and in death:--

Rain on the windows, creaking doors,
With blasts that besom the green,
And I am here, and you are there,
And a hundred miles between!

In _Beyond the Last Lamp_ we have the same mournful cry over severance.
There are few sadder poems than this with its tristful refrain, even in
the works of Mr. Hardy. It is too long to quote in full, but one may
give the last verses of this lyric of lovers in a lane:--

When I re-trod that watery way
Some hours beyond the droop of day,
Still I found pacing there the twain
Just as slowly, just as sadly,
Heedless of the night and rain.
One could but wonder who they were
And what wild woe detained them there.

Though thirty years of blur and blot
Have slid since I beheld that spot,
And saw in curious converse there
Moving slowly, moving sadly,
That mysterious tragic pair,
Its olden look may linger on--
All but the couple; they have gone.

W