Mr. Thomas Hardy was the inevitable sequel to George Eliot.  Everybody knows how beautiful and how full of charm his lighter writings can be; and in his more tragic work there is much that is true, terrifically expressed.  Yet he has got upon the wrong side of the world, and can never see beyond the horror of its tragedy.  Consequently in him we have another form of paganism, not this time that which the seductive earth with its charms is suggesting, but the hopeless paganism which sees the earth only in its bitterness.  In The Return of the Native he says:  “What the Greeks only suspected we know well; what their Aeschylus 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.”  It is no wonder that he who expressed the spirit of the modern age in these words should have closed his well-known novel with the bitter saying that the upper powers had finished their sport with Tess.  “To have lost the God-like conceit that we may do what we will, and not to have acquired a homely zest for doing what we can, shows a grandeur of temper which cannot be objected to in the abstract, for it denotes a mind that, though disappointed, forswears compromise.”  Here is obviously a man who would love the highest if he saw it, who would fain welcome and proclaim the ideals if he could only find them on the earth; but who has found instead the bitterness of darkness, the sarcasm and the sensationalism of an age that the gods have left.  He is too honest to shout pour encourager les autres when his own heart has no hope in it; and his greater books express the wail and despair of our modern paganism.

Breaking away from him and all such pessimistic voices came the glad soul of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose old-fashioned revelling in the situation is the exact counter-blast to Hardy’s modernism, and is one of those perennial human things which are ever both new and old.  It is not that Stevenson has not seen the other side of life.  He has seen it and he has suffered from it deeply, both in himself and in others; yet still indomitably he “clings to his paddle.”  “I believe,” he says, “in an ultimate decency of things; ay, and if I woke in hell, should still believe it.”

Then there came the extraordinary spirit of Mr. Rudyard Kipling.  At first sight some things that he has written appear pagan enough, and have been regarded as such.  The God of Christians seems to inhabit and preside over an amazing Valhalla of pagan divinities; and indeed throughout Mr. Kipling’s work the heavens and the earth are mingled in a most inextricable and astonishing fashion.  It is said that not long ago, during the launch of a Chinese battleship at one of our British yards, they were burning papers to the gods in a small joss-house upon the pier, while the great vessel, fitted with all the most modern machinery,