The Novelist (1870-1898)
generation is succeeded and exceeded by that of the next—and this applies in almost equal measure to contemporary English novelists, with one notable exception: Hardy himself. Modern drama, however, tells a somewhat different story, with cynicism rampant in comedy and with tragedy saturated, as always, with a pessimism seldom exceeded even by Schopenhauer's intellectual plunges into the depths of human existence. But tragedy by its essential nature presupposes catastrophe, and its success has always been in direct proportion to the violence with which the crack of doom bursts over the heads of the protagonists. It is perhaps true that we are to-day somewhat more familiar with disillusive reasoning, and that pessimistic utterances have a more familiar ring to our ears; but that the average thinking person accepts these ideas and conforms his life to the conclusions they indicate, is highly questionable.
Scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of the all too scanty remains of classical literature will probably be very slow to admit that the average reflective Greek thinker indulged in any "revelling in the general situation" to the degree which Hardy supposed. Of course the Greeks were a sanguine people, particularly after the national will had been stiffened by the successes of the Persian wars, but this great outburst of vitality has since been duplicated by other nations with much the same degree of "high spirits." One need only mention two familiar instances—the great Elizabethan literature, a veritable "revelling" in optimism, which followed the crushing of Spanish sea power by England, and the ascendance of the German drama after the
[175]
