Perhaps Hardy's proneness to dwell on the skeletonic grin of life is due to his exceeding sensitiveness to beauty. Like Poe and other poets, he cannot abide the ugliness that is in the world, and so he insists on The Conqueror Worm, as a man cannot refrain from thrusting his tongue into the sore tooth. Perhaps Hardy is a reaction against the saccharine optimism of his contemporaries and of those just before his time. They falsified life in their fictions by making everything come out nicely, thank you, on the last page. He leans over backward from that kind of untruth and comes dangerously near to being as false. As between falsity in one direction and falsity in the other, there is no choice, except that we have had so much of the sweet kind that Hardy is refreshing. He tends to restore the balance. Ask any man, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, how life has gone with him, and, if he is honest, he will tell you that life did not go definitely one way or the other. Things sometimes came out well and sometimes not. Hardy is biased in favor of the things that do not come out well. "Life's Little Ironies" is a good title, but it is a title that implies a thesis, an attitude from which humanity is surveyed. The stories are perfection and they sound true. Hardy is a logician and he will back any tale of his with evidence, even the first story in "Wessex Tales," in the preface of which the authority of physicians is invoked. But when you take all his stories together you find nine failures out of ten human careers, and life has a better batting average than that. No one doubts that the "Fellowtownsmen" got into such horrid confusion, that things happened as they shouldn't, that every shot at happiness was a miss. And "The Waiting Supper" is so convincing that you cannot escape. But the two stories together, regarded for the moment not as the excellent works of art which they are, but as a view of human destiny, weaken each other. One convinces you. The two together make you ask questions about the author. In "The Waiting Supper" there is one line that is as great a pathetic fallacy as the more familiar and cheery kind which represents nature as smiling upon the lovers. Hardy's lovers have to submit to this: "Thus the sad autumn afternoon waned, while the waterfall hissed sarcastically of the inevitableness of the unpleasant." Did you ever hear a waterfall like that? The only waterfalls I have heard quote Darwin and discuss the election returns. I know that the happy poet is a liar when he says that the nightingale is celebrating my love for Mamie, for the nightingale is concerned with other matters. But as between a nightingale who is sympathetic with my emotions and a sarcastic waterfall, I prefer the nightingale. And I do not like either in realistic fiction.