Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/208

 which, supposedly, separates the purely artistic ideals and methods of the Greeks from those of Hardy:

The view of life as a thing to be put up with, replacing the zest for existence which was so intense in early civilizations, must ultimately enter so thoroughly into the constitution of the advanced races that its facial expression will become accepted as a new artistic departure. . ..

The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive centuries has permanently replaced the Hellenic ideal of life, or whatever it may be called. What the Greeks only suspected we know well; what their Æschylus imagined our nursery children feel. That old-fashioned revelling in the general situation grows less and less possible as we uncover the defects of natural laws, and see the quandary man is in by their operation.

Both of the assumptions upon which the above excerpt is based are very emphatically open to question. In the first place, was the early "zest for existence" any more intense than it is to-day? The truth seems to be that outside of the Far-Eastern countries, which have for century after century clung to their ingrained notions of determinism and the inevitability of destiny, the "love of life" is as strong and universal a trait of mankind as ever. The fatalism expressed by East-Indian soldiers on the western front in the war struck the British with whom they came in contact as something remarkable and as a curiosity worth writing about—not as a view of life that had already become universal. Even a rather superficial acquaintance with the attitude of the latest voices in the poetry of to-day will lead one to believe that the unreasonable and unreasoning zest for existence is growing stronger and stronger in man as the tragedy of one