Mr. Hardy himself does not suggest the simple and melancholy pessimist. A mild old man, gentleness is the first quality one feels in him, but at eighty he still waxed his mustache tips, and his eyes lit eagerly. I remember how earnestly he denied knowledge of science, piqued, I suppose, by the omniscient who had declared that his art consisted of applying the results of scientific inquiry to the study of simple human nature. If his treatment of nature was scientific, as I affirmed, his wife agreed, and he did not deny, then, he implied, his knowledge came by intuition, not by theory. The war was still on when I talked with him. It had lifted him to poetry at first, but by 1918 no longer interested him vitally. "It is too mechanical," he said. His novels, where fate seems to operate mechanically sometimes, he was willing that day to set aside as nil. Poetry, he thought, was the only proper form of expression. The novel was too indirect; too wasteful of time and space in its attempt to come at real issues. Yet these real issues, it appeared as we talked, were not theories. Ideas, he said, if emphasized, destroy art. Writers, he thought, in the future would give up pure fiction (serious writers, I suppose he meant). Poetry would be their shorthand; they would by intenser language cut short to their end. What was _his_ end? Not mechanical, scientific theories, that was clear. Not mere realistic description of life. He told me he had little faith in mere observation, except for comic or quaint characterization. He had seldom if ever studied a serious character from a model. One woman he invented entirely (was it Tess?) and she was thought to be his best. What, then, was this essence which the novelist, growing old, would convey now in concentrated form by poetry which to him, so he said, was story- telling in verse.