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Rh author's mind and talent which is a singularly expressive work of art. Intimations of his mournful creed are scattered through the novels; no one, for instance, can read such a book as The Return of the Native without suspecting that he is in the presence of a confirmed pessimist, or without feeling that for the writer the forces of nature are no less essential characters of his tales than its men and women, and that behind their seeming violences and caprices is the purpose of an inscrutable will. Hitherto, however, Hardy's thoughts about his race had been revealed more or less unconsciously. In The Dynasts his gospel of despair is boldly and deliberately avowed, and forms, as it were, the atmosphere of the tragedy. The increase of self-expression involves no decrease of architectural skill. A drama covering the career of Napoleon was bound to range over an enormous field; yet never has Hardy's constructive genius mastered so completely as in his contest with difficulties arising from mass of material.

The apparatus he employs in connection with these wonderful series of dissolving views is decidedly original. He is fond of transporting his readers to heights in the air whence they can look down on the features of countries like so many Gullivers surveying the agitations of Lilliput. He makes use, too, of sundry dry supernatural characters— Recording Angels and Spirits Ironic and Sinister, Spirits of the Pities and Spirits of the Years—to comment aloud in choric fashion on the pranks of his puppets. He has a way even of turning X-rays, so to speak, upon the stage-crowds to show "brain-tissues of the Immanent Will" pervading them all, and influencing them to achieve its blind purposes. This machinery is serviceable so far as it affords us bird's-eye glances at battles and campaigns and the movements of huge military forces—in so far as it spreads out beneath our feet a relief map of that arena of Europe on which the drama of Napoleon's life was played. It has its disadvantage in that the author often keeps us too far away from the actors to allow of our regarding them as fellow-creatures, and also exacts from us an almost impossible attitude of neutrality.

But not even Hardy can keep up the pose of aloofness which he demands from the student of his play. By degrees the philosopher turns into the sympathetic observer, the pessimist gives place to the indignant humourist; and except when his choruses express the hopeless litany of fatalism, his scenes grow warm with natural emotion.