This is worse than optimism.

It is only fair to say that, though poem after poem—­including the one about the fat young man whom the doctors gave only six months to live unless he walked a great deal, and who therefore was compelled to refuse a drive in the poet’s phaeton, though night was closing over the heath—­dramatizes the meaningless miseries of life, there is also to be found in some of the poems a faint sunset-glow of hope, almost of faith.  There have been compensations, we realize in I Travel as a Phantom Now, even in this world of skeletons.  Mr. Hardy’s fatalism concerning God seems not very far from faith in God in that beautiful Christmas poem, The Oxen.  Still, the ultimate mood of the poems is not faith.  It is one of pity, so despairing as to be almost nihilism.  There is mockery in it without the merriment of mockery.  The general atmosphere of the poems, it seems to me, is to be found perfectly expressed in the last three lines of one of the poems, which is about a churchyard, a dead woman, a living rival, and the ghost of a soldier: 

    There was a cry by the white-flowered mound,
    There was a laugh from underground,
    There was a deeper gloom around.

How much of the art of Thomas Hardy is suggested in those lines!  The laugh from underground, the deeper gloom—­are they not all but omnipresent throughout his later and greatest work?  The war could not deepen such pessimism.  As a matter of fact, Mr. Hardy’s war poetry is more cheerful, because more heroic, than his poetry about the normal world.  Destiny was already crueller than any war-lord.  The Prussian, to such an imagination, could be no more than a fly—­a poisonous fly—­on the wheel of destiny’s disastrous car.