He puts into the mouths of field, flock, and tree—because while he gazed at them at dawn they looked like chastened children sitting in school silent—the question,—
“Has some Vast Imbecility,
Mighty to build and blend,
But impotent to tend,
Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?”
Napoleon, in the “Dynasts,” asks the question, “Why am I here?” and answers it,—
“By laws imposed on me inexorably.
History makes use of me to weave her web.”
Twentieth century superstition can no farther go than in that enormous poem, which is astonishing in many ways, not least in being readable. I call it superstition because truth, or a genuine attempt at truth, has been turned apparently by an isolated rustic imagination into an obsession so powerful that only a very great talent could have rescued anything uninjured from the weight of it. A hundred years ago, Mr. Hardy would have seen “real ghosts.” To-day he has to invent them, and call his Spirits of the Years and of the Pities, Spirits Sinister and Ironic, Rumours and Recording Angels, who have the best seats at the human comedy, “contrivances of the fancy merely.”