It is easier to understand what he meant if one thinks how definitely Hardy belongs to his age, the latter nineteenth century, in spite of his reachings forward. On the one hand, his very gentleness is characteristic of a period that was above all others humane, On the other, his somber moods sprang from a generation that was the first to understand the implications of the struggle for life in the animal world all about them. They, to be sure, deduced from what they saw a vague theory of evolution in which the best (who were themselves) somehow were to come out best in the end. He, though gentle as they were, deduced nothing so cheerful, saw rather the terrible discrepancies between fact and theory, so that his very gentleness made him pessimistic, where Browning was optimistic. Then, like Hawthorne in the generation before him, Hardy went back to an earlier, simpler life than his own, and there made his inquiries. Hawthorne, who did not accept the theology of Puritanism, was yet strangely troubled by the problem of sin. Hardy, accepting the implacability of evolution without its easy optimism, was intensely moved to pity. This is his open secret. The clearest statement is in his poetry, where again and again, in our conversation that day, he seemed to be placing it--most of all, I think, in "The Dynasts." "The Dynasts" was published too soon. We English speakers, in 1904-1906, were beginning to read plays again, under the stimulus of a dramatic revival, and the plays we read were successful on the stage. As I recollect the criticism of "The Dynasts," much of it at least was busied with the form of the drama, its great length and unwieldiness. We thought of it not as a dramatic epic, but as a dramatized novel--a mistake. We thought that Hardy was taking the long way around, when in truth he had found a short cut to his issues. That "The Dynasts," considering the vastness of its Napoleonic subject, was far more concise, more direct, clearer than his novels, did not become manifest, although the sharper- eyed may have seen it. In "The Dynasts" I find all of Hardy. The Immanent Will is God, as Hardy conceives Him, neither rational nor entirely conscious, frustrating His own seeming ends, without irony and without compassion, and yet perhaps evolving like His world, clearing like men's visions, moving towards consistency. The Sinister Angel and the Ironic Angel are moods well known to Hardy, but not loved by him. The Spirit of the Years that sees how poor human nature collides with accident, or the inevitable, and is bruised, is Hardy's reasoned philosophy. The Spirit of Pities (not always, as he says, logical or consistent) is Hardy's own desire, his will, his faint but deep-felt hope. I quote, from the very end of the great spectacle, some lines in which the Spirits, who have watched the confused tragedy of the Napoleonic age, sum up their thoughts: AFTER SCENE SPIRIT OF THE YEARS