Contributors to the April Number ROBERT PALFREY UTTER is Associate Professor of English in Amherst College, Massachusetts. H. MERIAN ALLEN is an attorney-at-law in Philadelphia. BENJAMIN W. WELLS, author of histories of French and German literature and editor of numerous school texts in French and German, lives in New York City. ARTHUR COLTON, author of several volumes of stories and essays, lives in New York City. T. M. CAMPBELL is Professor of German in the RandolphMacon College for Women. 1 LEWIS WORTHINGTON SMITH, author of The Mechanism of English Style, Ships in Port, In Sunday's Tent, etc., is Professor of English Literature in Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. KILLIS CAMPBELL is Associate Professor of English in the University of Texas. WILLIAM THOMAS LAPRADE is Professor of History in Trinity College, North Carolina. HORACE HENRY HAGAN is a member of the legal department of the Texas Company, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. EDGAR EUGENE ROBINSON is a Professor of History in Leland Stanford Junior University. JOHN BEATY is a Traveling Scholar of the University of Virginia. Statement of the Ownership, Management, etc., of The Sewanee Review, published Quarterly at Sewanee, Tennessee, required by the Act of Congress of August 24, 1912: Editor, John M. McBryde, Jr., Sewanee, Tenn.; Secretary-Treasurer, James C. Preston, Sewanee, Tenn.; Publisher ond Owner, THE SEWANEE REVIEW, Sewanee, Tenn., a corporation not for profit, incorporated under the laws of the State of Tennessee; no stock issued. (Signed) JAS. C. PRESTON, Secretary-Treasurer. Sworn to and subscribed before me this 2nd day of April, 1917. (SEAL) My commission expires Oct., 1920. THE WORK OF THOMAS HARDY "One writing of heroes," the favorite author of a certain Mr. Nevil Beauchamp, tells us that the open secret is divulged to each age by its fit hero, and that the age of the prophet shall not hear it from the lips of the man of letters. Once in a while,—and this he does not tell us,-a hero of an earlier time comes forward again to sing in no disharmony with his latter-day brethren his version of the song. The song is all one, and its name is The Meaning of Life. To Thomas Hardy life means what it meant of old to the Northern singers. His expression of it is in images like to theirs; and could we trace the growth of their thought as we can of his, we might find the two alike in their beginning, and in their increase in vigor and scope. Hardy's thought is that of the age when the hero was a god; he is as Odin in the twentieth century, and he sings us the epic of our forefathers. When we enter Barsetshire with Trollope we are in the midst of Victorian England. When with Hardy we enter Wessex, we are in a Saxon kingdom that has not been on the map since there have been maps, even as an earldom it seems to have disappeared about the time of the Norman Conquest. Doubtless he adopts the name for no conscious motive but to signal his departure from fact, but to the reader it soon becomes symbolic of his outlook on life,-Saxon and not English; ninth century and not nineteenth. It is there he stands; and whatever there is of the new age in his books he shows us down the perspective of ten centuries, outlines merely through the mists of time. In the Saxon kingdom his feet are firmly planted. There with him we are forever in the presence of memorials of the older peoples,— their burial places, mounds and barrows, their monuments, Stonehenge and the druid circles. He has a haunting sense of the primitive in character. He sees his figures against the background of their ancestry; their acts are one with those of family, race, or tribe. And in this the distinctive thing is, not that he sees in heredity one of the forces, perhaps the main force, of the fate in the hands of which his characters are helpless, but that to him tribal and racial origins are uniformly Norse or Germanic. Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes; Searobbers sweeping the coasts of Sussex, Wessex, and Kent; foray, raid, and reprisal;-these are the forces that mould his men and women. There is an occasional Roman legion that comes and goes with no other effect than to give a name to the place of its encampment. In the formation of character, Hardy recognizes no force that was not at work before the coming of the Normans. Norse or Germanic, our ancestors had an outlook on life that was neither clear nor bright. They were not thinkers; they did not often pause to look ahead, but when they did they saw a gloom and obscurity they could not penetrate. Beauty must perish; Balder must die; Loki prevails that he shall not return. However much or little they believed in life after death they could not see beyond the grave. The abodes of the dead are earthy, damp, cold, and sunless as the grave itself; the road to them, whether it be mortal or immortal who travels it, leads ever downward and northward. Hardly better off than mankind are the gods themselves, who over their own fate or that of men have little power. They are primitive ideals, glorified men, heroes writ large, magnificent in physical strength, their craft increased by magic and freedom from natural law; but there is in them nothing of the spirit, and their power is not from it. In the last cataclysm they go down before huge insensate powers, the Fenris Wolf, and the Midgard Serpent. They know they are to die, and they go gloriously to their end at the hands of a senseless inexorability. There are hints of a sunrise to follow the twilight of the gods, but they are vaguer even than the nature of the end. It is the mythology of a race of fighters whose minds do not reach beyond their own experience. Their imagination is as a mirror, or as a series of mirrors which reflect back and forth one into another successively fainter images of the same thing. Without going into the nature and origin of myth one may be permitted to see here the cycle of good and evil, summer and winter, getting vaguer as it gets more remote from life, lingering always on the winter, the cheerless cold, the longest part of the year. And whatever we may believe about the origin of it all, we must feel that there is something here of the influence of nature on mood and thought. We see man in the grip of the iron frost, which relaxes only long enough to give him an elusive ray of hope. Inexorable as the cold may be, hope flickers bravely through to the end. Even in the last and longest winter of all, the man thinks that if only he could survive long enough there might be springtime beyond. All this is, of course, the Norse mythology, but it represents accurately enough the outlook on life of our Germanic ancestors. The Beowulf is their epic, the one piece of literature we have which they brought with them from the continent. In it the only religious principle that is expressed is "Gath a wyrd swa hio scel”—Goeth ever fate as it will. It means that in the ultimate power the man sees no thinking being like himself. In the dawning of religious thought he creates gods in his own image, exalted men. He makes them thinking and sentient,-powers for good so far as their powers go. But as he thinks further he sees good constantly overcome by evil; there must be a blind power stronger than the gods. They, though their power is less, are not blind. It is as if Ulysses were shut forever into the cave with the blinded and maddened Polyphemus-and that, one must think, would have been the situation if the Northern peoples had told the story; it is the cheerful Southern races who allow the sailors to escape. From the forces outside yourself, then, you have nothing to hope. Within there is something more, but only so much of comfort as lies in your sense of superiority to the Polyphemus fate. This sense is based on the rationality and justice of your actions. You cannot respect fate. If you can respect yourself, you are superior. Cling to your selfrespect, then, for it is all you have. And this our forefathers did in something the spirit of the Earl's daughter in Stevenson's fable: "I have no heart for it," she said, "but it is all God offers." Although this is the mood of a race of fighters, it is not the simple faith of men of action who might be expected to have an |