a faint sunset-glow of hope, almost of faith.
There have been compensations, we realize in _I Travel as a Phantom
Now_, even in this world of skeletons. Mr. Hardy's fatalism concerning
God seems not very far from faith in God in that beautiful Christmas
poem, _The Oxen_. Still, the ultimate mood of the poems is not faith. It
is one of pity, so despairing as to be almost nihilism. There is mockery
in it without the merriment of mockery. The general atmosphere of the
poems, it seems to me, is to be found perfectly expressed in the last
three lines of one of the poems, which is about a churchyard, a dead
woman, a living rival, and the ghost of a soldier:

There was a cry by the white-flowered mound,
There was a laugh from underground,
There was a deeper gloom around.

How much of the art of Thomas Hardy is suggested in those lines! The
laugh from underground, the deeper gloom--are they not all but
omnipresent throughout his later and greatest work? The war could not
deepen such pessimism. As a matter of fact, Mr. Hardy's war poetry is
more cheerful, because more heroic, than his poetry about the normal
world. Destiny was already crueller than any war-lord. The Prussian, to
such an imagination, could be no more than a fly--a poisonous fly--on
the wheel of destiny's disastrous car.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Old and New Masters, by Robert Lynd

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD AND NEW MASTERS ***

***** This file should be named 12600.txt or 12600.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.net/1/2/6/0/12600/

Produced by Christine Gehring, Christine Gehring, Wilelmina Malliere
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not cha