There are no happy lovers or happy marriages in Mr. Hardy’s world.  Such people as are happy would not be happy if only they knew the truth.  Many of Mr. Hardy’s poems are, as I have already said, dramatic lyrics on the pattern invented by Robert Browning—­short stories in verse.  But there is a certain air of triumph even in Browning’s tragic figures.  Mr. Hardy’s figures are the inmates of despair.  Browning’s love-poems belong to heroic literature.  Mr. Hardy’s love-poems belong to the literature of downheartedness.  Browning’s men and women are men and women who have had the courage of their love, or who are shown at least against a background of Browning’s own courage.  Mr. Hardy’s men and women do not know the wild faith of love.  They have not the courage even of their sins.  They are helpless as fishes in a net—­a scarcely rebellious population of the ill-matched and the ill-starred.

Many of the poems in his last book fail through a lack of imaginative energy.  It is imaginative energy that makes the reading of a great tragedy like King Lear not a depressing, but an exalting experience.  But is there anything save depression to be got from reading such a poem as A Caged Goldfinch:—­

    Within a churchyard, on a recent grave,
      I saw a little cage
    That jailed a goldfinch.  All was silence, save
      Its hops from stage to stage.

    There was inquiry in its wistful eye. 
      And once it tried to sing;
    Of him or her who placed it there, and why,
      No one knew anything.

    True, a woman was found drowned the day ensuing,
      And some at times averred
    The grave to be her false one’s, who when wooing
      Gave her the bird.

Apart even from the ludicrous associations which modern slang has given the last phrase, making it look like a queer pun, this poem seems to one to drive sorrow over the edge of the ridiculous.  That goldfinch has surely escaped from a Max-Beerbohm parody.  The ingenuity with which Mr. Hardy plots tragic situations for his characters in some of his other poems is, indeed, in repeated danger of misleading him into parody.  One of his poems tells, for instance, how a stranger finds an old man scrubbing a Statue of Liberty in a city square, and, hearing he does it for love, hails him as “Liberty’s knight divine.”  The old man confesses that he does not care twopence for Liberty, and declares that he keeps the statue clean in memory of his beautiful daughter, who had sat as a model for it—­a girl fair in fame as in form.  In the interests of his plot and his dismal philosophy, Mr. Hardy identifies the stranger with the sculptor of the statue, and dismisses us with his blighting aside on the old man’s credulous love of his dead daughter: 

Answer I gave not.  Of that form
The carver was I at his side;
His child my model, held so saintly,
Grand in feature. 
Gross in nature,
In the dens of vice had died.