, or of ideas, that he found
the supreme revelation of love.

With this narrowness, with this intensity, he has rendered in his
painting as in his poetry one ideal, one obsession. He calls what is
really the House of Love _The House of Life_, and this is because the
house of love was literally to him the house of life. There is no mystic
to whom love has not seemed to be the essence or ultimate expression of
the soul. Rossetti's whole work is a parable of this belief, and it is a
parable written with his life-blood. Of beauty he has said, 'I drew it
in as simply as my breath,' but, as the desire of beauty possessed him,
as he laboured to create it over again, with rebellious words or
colours, always too vague for him when they were most precise, never the
precise embodiment of a dream, the pursuit turned to a labour and the
labour to a pain. Part of what hypnotises us in this work is, no doubt,
that sense of personal tragedy which comes to us out of its elaborate
beauty: the eternal tragedy of those who have loved the absolute in
beauty too well, and with too mortal a thirst.

1904.

A NOTE ON THE GENIUS OF THOMAS HARDY

He has a kind of naked face, in which you see the brain always working,
with an almost painful simplicity--just saved from being painful by a
humorous sense of external things, which becomes also a kind of
intellectual criticism. He is a fatalist, and he studies the workings of
fate in the chief vivifying and disturbing influence in life, women. His
view of women is more French than English; it is subtle, a little cruel,
not as tolerant as it seems, thoroughly a man's point of view, and not,
as with Meredith, man's and woman's at once. He sees all that is
irresponsible for good and evil in a woman's character, all that is
unreliable in her brain and will, all that is alluring in her
variability. He is her apologist, but always with a certain reserve of
private judgment. No one has created more attractive women, women whom
a man would have been more likely to love, or more likely to regret
loving. _Jude the Obscure_ is perhaps the most unbiased consideration of
the more complicated questions of sex which we can find in English
fiction. At the same time, there is almost no passion in his work,
neither the author nor any of his characters ever seeming able to pass
beyond the state of curiosity, the most intellectually interesting of
limitations, under the influence of any emotion. In his feelin