pessimist, as he is now. The present world-war may seem to him a
vindication of his despair, and therefore proof of the blind folly of
those who pray to Our Father in Heaven. He is, though I think not
avowedly so, an adherent of the philosophy of Schopenhauer and von
Hartmann. The primal force, from which all things proceed, is the
Immanent Will. The Will is unconscious and omnipotent. It is
superhuman only in power, lacking intelligence, foresight, and any
sense of ethical values. In _The Dynasts,_ Mr. Hardy has written
an epic illustration of the doctrines of pessimism.

Supernatural machinery and celestial inspiration have always been more
or less conventional in the Epic. Ancient writers invoked the Muse.
When Milton began his great task, he wished to produce something
classic in form and Christian in spirit. He found an admirable
solution of his problem in a double invocation--first of the Heavenly
Muse of Mount Sinai, second, of the Holy Spirit. In the composition of
_In Memoriam_, Tennyson knew that an invocation of the Muse would
give an intolerable air of artificiality to the poem; he therefore, in
the introductory stanzas, offered up a prayer to the Son of God. Now
it was impossible for Mr. Hardy to make use of Greek Deities, or of
Jehovah, or of any revelation of God in Christ; to his mind all three
equally belonged to the lumber-room of discredited and discarded myth.
He believes that any conception of the Primal Force as a Personality
is not only obsolete among thinking men and women, but that it is
unworthy of modern thought. It is perhaps easy to mistake our own
world of thought for the thought of the world.

In his Preface, written with assurance and dignity, Mr. Hardy says:
"The wide prevalence of the Monistic theory of the Universe forbade,
in this twentieth century, the importation of Divine personages from