The reader instinctively pictures Hardy as a morose, grim, cynical man--but he is really anything but that. From all accounts Hardy is mirrored in the whimsical and deep mirth that is so intermixed in the rustic characters in his novels. "It is too often assumed," says the capricious and tiresome Ethelberta--April-natured Hardy would call her--"that a person's fancy is a person's real mind.... Some of the lightest of rhymes were composed between the deepest fits of dismals I have known." Some years ago _The English Illustrated Magazine_ printed an account of a visit paid by a cyclist to Hardy at his Dorchester home. Authentic pictures of Hardy are so scarce that I venture to draw on this interview: "The picture he presented was, for the moment at least, all-satisfying; there was more than nervousness in the strangely harassed-looking face, with the most sensitive features that I had ever seen. The deep-set eyes were troubled, but there was no mistaking their fearless courage. I knew that I was looking at a man whose soul was more ravaged than ever his careworn features were with the riddle of life and the tragedy of it, and yet a soul utterly self-reliant, for all the shyness of the outward man. "I attempted no compliments, and asked him instead why he was so pessimistic a writer, why he wrote at once the most beautiful and the most dreadful of stories, and why he had not shown us far more often than he has done a picture of requited love, or of requited love that was not victimised at once by some pitiless act of fate. "Mr Hardy had not sat down himself, but had stood by the fireplace, with his white hands holding the lapels of his old-fashioned tweed coat. "We were on better terms in a moment, as Mr Hardy replied, his voice curiously halting, but not as if he was in any doubt of his sentiments. It seemed a mixture of irony and diffidence. "'You are a young man,' he said. 'The cruelty of fate becomes apparent to people as they grow older. At first one may perhaps escape contact with it, but if one lives long enough one realises that happiness is very ephemeral.' "'But is not optimism a useful and sane philosophy?' I asked him. "There's too much sham optimism, humbugging and even cruel optimism,' Mr Hardy retorted. 'Sham optimism is really a more heartless doctrine to preach than even an exaggerated pessimism--the latter leaves one at least on the safe side. There is too much sentiment in most fiction. It is necessary for somebody to write a little mercilessly, although, of course, it's painful to have to do it.'" That is what we must do if we wish to move on the higher ideal of philosophical speculation as Hardy explains it. He points out that there is something in a novel that should transcend pessimism, meliorism or optimism, and that is the search for truth: