In brief, experience is its own justification; and this fact must be faced, although sometimes--by a lover, for example--it may be very difficult to accept. Once it is faced, it is apparent that all the attitudes to other human beings and to the world in all its aspects, which have been serviceable to humanity, remain as they were, as valuable as ever. Hesitation felt in admitting this is a measure of the strength of the evil habit we have described. But many of these attitudes, valuable as ever, are, now that they are being set free, more difficult to maintain, because we still hunger after a basis in belief. VII. Some Contemporary Poets It is time to turn to those living poets through study of whose work these reflections have arisen. Mr. Hardy is for every reason the poet with whom it is most natural to begin. Not only does his work span the whole period in which what I have called the neutralisation of nature was finally effected, but it has throughout definitely reflected that change. Short essays in verse are fairly frequent among his _Collected Poems_, essays almost always dealing with this very topic; but these, however suggestive, are not the ground for singling him out as the poet who has most fully and courageously accepted the contemporary background; nor are the poems which are most definitely _about_ the neutrality of nature the ground for the assertion. There is an opportunity for a misunderstanding at this point. The ground is the tone, the handling and the rhythm of poems which treat other subjects, for example _The Self Unseeing_, _The Voice_, _A Broken Appointment_, and pre-eminently _After a Journey_. A poem does not necessarily accept the situation because it gives it explicit recognition, but only through the precise mutation of the attitudes of which it is composed. Mr. Middleton Murry, against whose recent positions parts of this essay may be suspected by the reader to be aimed, has best pointed out, in his _Aspects of Literature_, how peculiarly “adequate to what we know and have suffered” Mr. Hardy’s poetry is. “His reaction to an episode has behind it and within it a reaction to the universe.” This is not as I should put it were I making a statement; but read as a pseudo-statement, emotively, it is excellent; it makes us remember how we felt. Actually, it describes just what Hardy, at his best, does not do. He makes no reaction to the universe, recognizing it as something to which no reaction is more relevant than another. Mr. Murry is again well inspired, this time both emotively and scientifically, when he says: “Mr. Hardy stands high above all other modern poets by the deliberate purity of his responsiveness. The contagion of the world’s slow stain has not touched him; from the first he held aloof from the general conspiracy to forget in which not only those who are professional optimists take a part.” These extracts (from a writer more agonizingly aware than others that some strange change has befallen