I once met a lady in New York who afterwards expressed herself as being deeply disappointed with the meeting, on the ground that I had a childish mind. As evidence she gave the fact that I had said in her presence that Thomas Hardy was a greater man than George Bernard Shaw. The incident gave me a severe shock, not only because one naturally expects to be loved by all, but because till that moment I had never realized that any fully literate person could possibly place Mr. Shaw above Mr. Hardy; and I still do not think that any artist could do so. Nevertheless, when I try to find precise justifications for my certainty, I fmd it hard to do so. Mr. Hardy has attained absolute beauty again and again in his prose and his verse, but there is a great deal to be said against him. His novels are of extremely unequal merit, and some of them (as The Well-Beloved) have practically no aesthetic quality. Both they and his poetry are perpetually at the mercy of a certain comic lugubriousness, which at any moment may transform him from a vehicle of the Tragic Muse into an imaginative mortician. Moreover he has had very little practical effect on the life of his time. I can think of no social or political problem that is any nearer its solution because of any illumination given by Mr. Hardy. Indeed I imagine that Mr. Hardy rarely approaches the intellectual side of life save through the avenue of history, which he treads in a mood of intense romanticism and very vague and untutored philosophic enquiry.