by Thomas Hardy
We should judge carelessly, however, if we treated the subsequent volumes as mere repetitions of the original Wessex Poems. They present interesting differences, which I may rapidly note before I touch on the features which characterise the whole body of Mr. Hardy’s verse. Poems of the Past and Present, which came out in the first days of 1902, could not but be in a certain measure disappointing, in so far as it paralleled its three years’ product with that of the thirty years of Wessex Poems. Old pieces were published in it, and it was obvious that in 1898 Mr. Hardy might be expected to have chosen from what used to be called his “portfolio” those specimens which he thought to be most attractive. But on further inspection this did not prove to be quite the case. After pondering for twelve years on the era of Napoleon, his preoccupation began in 1887 to drive him into song: —
“Must I pipe a palinody, Or be silent thereupon?”
He decides that silence has become impossible: —
“Nay; I’ll sing ‘The Bridge of Lodi’ — That long-loved, romantic thing, Though none show by smile or nod, he Guesses why and what I sing!”
Here is the germ of The Dynasts. But in the meantime the crisis of the Boer War had cut across the poet’s dream of Europe a hundred years ago, and a group of records of the Dorsetshire elements of the British army at the close of 1899 showed in Mr. Hardy’s poetry what had not been suspected there — a military talent of a most remarkable kind. Another set of pieces composed in Rome were not so interesting; Mr. Hardy always seems a little languid when he leaves the confines of his native Wessex. Another section of Poems of the Past and Present is severely, almost didactically, metaphysical, and expands in varied language the daring thought, so constantly present in Mr. Hardy’s reverie, that God Himself has forgotten the existence of earth, this “tiny sphere,” this “tainted ball,” “so poor a thing,” and has left all human life to be the plaything of blind chance. This sad conviction is hardly ruffled by “The Darkling Thrush,” which goes as far towards optimism as Mr. Hardy can let himself be drawn, or by such reflections as those in “On a Fine Morning”: —
“Whence comes Solace? Not from seeing What is doing, suffering, being; Not from noting Life’s conditions, Not from heeding Time’s monitions; But in cleaving to the Dream, And in gazing on the gleam Whereby gray things golden seem.”
Eight years more passed, years marked by the stupendous effort of The Dynasts, before Mr. Hardy put forth another collection of lyrical poems. Time’s Laughingstocks confirmed, and more than confirmed, the high promise of Wessex Poems. The author, in one of his modest prefaces, where he seems to whisper while we bend forward in our anxiety not to miss one thrifty sentence, expresses the hope that Time’s Laughingstocks will, as a whole, take the “reader forward, even if not far, rather than backward.”
The book, indeed, does not take us “far” forward, simply because the writer’s style and scope were definitely exposed to us already, and yet it does take us “forward,” because the hand of the master is conspicuously firmer and his touch more daring. The Laughingstocks themselves are fifteen in number, tragical stories of division and isolation, of failures in passion, of the treason of physical decay. No landscape of Mr. Hardy’s had been more vivid than the night-pictures in “The Revisitation,” where the old soldier in barracks creeps out on to the gaunt down, and meets (by one of Mr. Hardy’s coincidences) his ancient mistress, and no picture more terrible than the revelation of each to the other in a blaze of sunrise. What a document for the future is “Reminiscences of a Dancing Man”? If only Shakespeare could have left us such a song of the London in 1585! But the power of the poet culminates in the pathos of “The Tramp Woman” — perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hardy’s lyrical poems — and in the horror of “A Sunday Morning’s Tragedy.”
It is noticeable that Time’s Laughingstocks is, in some respects, a more daring collection than its predecessors. We find the poet here entirely emancipated from convention, and guided both in religion and morals exclusively by the inner light of his reflection. His energy now interacts on his clairvoyance with a completeness which he had never quite displayed before, and it is here that we find Mr. Hardy’s utterance peculiarly a quintessence of himself. Especially in the narrative pieces — which are often Wessex novels distilled into a wine-glass, such as “Rose-Ann,” and “The Vampirine Fair” — he allows no considerations of what the reader may think “nice” or “pleasant” to shackle his sincerity or his determination; and it is therefore to Time’s Laughingstocks that the reader who wishes to become intimately acquainted with Mr. Hardy as a moralist most frequently recurs. We notice here more than elsewhere in his poems Mr. Hardy’s sympathy with the local music of Wessex, and especially with its expression by the village choir, which he uses as a spiritual symbol. Quite a large section of Time’s Laughingstocks takes us to the old-fashioned gallery of some church, where the minstrels are bowing “New Sabbath” or “Mount Ephraim,” or to a later scene where the ghosts, in whose melancholy apparition Mr. Hardy takes such pleasure, chant their goblin melodies and strum “the viols of the dead” in the moonlit churchyard. The very essence of Mr. Hardy’s reverie at this moment of his career is to be found, for instance, in “The Dead Quire,” where the ancient phantom-minstrels revenge themselves on their gross grandsons outside the alehouse.
Almost immediately after the outbreak of the present war Mr. Hardy presented to a somewhat distraught and inattentive public another collection of his poems. It cannot be said that Satires of Circumstance is the most satisfactory of those volumes; it is, perhaps, that which we could with the least discomposure persuade ourselves to overlook. Such a statement refers more to the high quality of other pages than to any positive decay of power or finish here. There is no less adroitness of touch and penetration of view in this book than elsewhere, and the poet awakens once more our admiration by his skill in giving poetic value to minute conditions of life which have escaped less careful observers. But in Satires of Circumstance the ugliness of experience is more accentuated than it is elsewhere, and is flung in our face with less compunction. The pieces which give name to the volume are only fifteen in number, but the spirit which inspires them is very frequently repeated in other parts of the collection. That spirit is one of mocking sarcasm, and it acts in every case by presenting a beautifully draped figure of illusion, from which the poet, like a sardonic showman, twitches away the robe that he may display a skeleton beneath it. We can with little danger assume, as we read the Satires of Circumstance, hard and cruel shafts of searchlight as they seem, that Mr. Hardy was passing through a mental crisis when he wrote them. This seems to be the Troilus and Cressida of his life’s work, the book in which he is revealed most distracted by conjecture and most overwhelmed by the miscarriage of everything. The wells of human hope have been poisoned for him by some condition of which we know nothing, and even the picturesque features of Dorsetshire landscape, that have always before dispersed his melancholy, fail to win his attention: —
“Bright yellowhammers Made mirthful clamours, And billed long straws with a bustling air, And bearing their load, Flew up the road That he followed alone, without interest there.”
The strongest of the poems of disillusion which are the outcome of this mood, is “The Newcomer’s Wife,” with the terrible abruptness of its last stanza. It is not for criticism to find fault with the theme of a work of art, but only to comment upon its execution. Of the merit of these monotonously sinister Satires of Circumstance there can be no question; whether the poet’s indulgence in the mood which gave birth to them does not tend to lower our moral temperature and to lessen the rebound of our energy, is another matter. At all events, every one must welcome a postscript in which a blast on the bugle of war seemed to have wakened the poet from his dark brooding to the sense of a new chapter in history.
In the fourth year of the war the veteran poet published Moments of Vision. These show a remarkable recovery of spirit, and an ingenuity never before excelled. With the passage of
years Mr. Hardy, observing everything in the little world of Wessex, and forgetting nothing, has become almost preternaturally wise, and, if it may be said so, “knowing,” with a sort of magic, like that of a wizard. He has learned to track the windings of the human heart with the familiarity of a gamekeeper who finds plenty of vermin in the woods, and who nails what he finds, be it stoat or squirrel, to the barn-door of his poetry. But there is also in these last-fruits of Mr. Hardy’s mossed tree much that is wholly detached from the bitterness of satire, much that simply records, with an infinite delicacy of pathos, little incidents of the personal life of long ago, bestowing the immortality of art on these fugitive fancies in the spirit of the Japanese sculptor when he chisels the melting of a cloud or the flight of an insect on his sword hilt: —
“I idly cut a parsley stalk And blew therein towards the moon; I had not thought what ghosts would walk With shivering footsteps to my tune.
“I went and knelt, and scooped my hand As if to drink, into the brook, And a faint figure seemed to stand Above me, with the bye-gone look.
“I lipped rough rhymes of chance not choice, I thought not what my words might be; There came into my ear a voice That turned a tenderer verse for me.”
We have now in brief historic survey marshalled before us the various volumes in which Mr. Hardy’s lyrical poetry was originally collected. Before we examine its general character more closely, it may be well to call attention to its technical quality, which was singularly misunderstood at first, and which has never, we believe, been boldly faced. In 1898, and later, when a melodious falsetto was much in fashion amongst us, the reviewers found great fault with Mr. Hardy’s prosody; they judged him as a versifier to be rude and incorrect. As regards the single line, it may be confessed that Mr. Hardy, in his anxiety to present his thought in an undiluted form, is not infrequently clogged and hard. Such a line as
“Fused from its separateness by ecstasy”
hisses at us like a snake, and crawls like a wounded one. Mr. Hardy is apt to clog his lines with consonants, and he seems indifferent to the stiffness which is the consequence of this neglect. Ben Jonson said that “Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging”; perhaps we may go so far as to say that Mr. Hardy, for his indifference to a mellifluous run lays himself open to a mild rebuke. He is negligent of that eternal ornament of English verse, audible intricacy, probably because of Swinburne’s abuse of it. But most of what is called his harshness should rather be called bareness, and is the result of a revolt, conscious or unconscious, against Keats’ prescription of “loading the rifts with ore.”
In saying this, all has been said that an enemy could in justice say in blame of his metrical peculiarities. Unquestionably he does occasionally, like Robert Browning, err in the direction of cacophony. But when we turn to the broader part of prosody, we must perceive that Mr. Hardy is not only a very ingenious, but a very correct and admirable metricist. His stanzaic invention is abundant; no other Victorian poet, not even Swinburne, has employed so many forms, mostly of his own invention, and employed them so appropriately, that is to say, in so close harmony with the subject or story enshrined in them. To take an example from his pure lyrics of reflection first, from “The Bullfinches”: —
“Brother Bulleys, let us sing From the dawn till evening! For we know not that we go not When the day’s pale visions fold Unto those who sang of old,”
in the exquisite fineness and sadness of the stanza we seem to hear the very voices of the birds warbling faintly in the sunset. Again, the hurried, timid irresolution of a lover always too late is marvellously rendered in the form of “Lizbie Browne”: —
“And Lizbie Browne, Who else had hair Bay-red as yours, Or flesh so fair Bred out of doors, Sweet Lizbie Browne?”
On the other hand, the fierceness of “I said to Love” is interpreted in a stanza that suits the mood of denunciation, while “Tess’s Lament” wails in a metre which seems to rock like an ageing woman seated alone before the fire, with an infinite haunting sadness.
It is, however, in the narrative pieces, the little Wessex Tales, that Mr. Hardy’s metrical imagination is most triumphant. No two of these are identical in form, and for each he selects, or more often invents, a wholly appropriate stanza. He makes many experiments, one of the strangest being the introduction of rhymeless lines at regular intervals. Of this, “Cicely” is an example which repays attention: —
“And still sadly onward I followed, That Highway the Icen Which trails its pale riband down Wessex O’er lynchet and lea.
“Along through the Stour-bordered Forum, Where legions had wayfared, And where the slow river up-glasses Its green canopy”;
and one still more remarkable is the enchanting “Friends Beyond,” to which we shall presently recur. The drawling voice of a weary old campaigner is wonderfully rendered in the stanza of “Valenciennes”: —
“Well: Heaven wi’ its jasper halls Is now the on’y town I care to be in.. Good Lord, if Nick should bomb the walls As we did Valencieën!”
whereas for long Napoleonic stories like “Leipzig” and “The Peasant’s Confession,” a ballad-measure which contemporaries such as Southey or Campbell might have used is artfully chosen. In striking contrast we have the elabourate verse-form of “The Souls of the Slain,” in which the throbbing stanza seems to dilate and withdraw like the very cloud of moth-like phantoms which it describes. It is difficult to follow out this theme without more frequent quotation than I have space, for here, but the reader who pursues it carefully will not repeat the rumour that Mr. Hardy is a careless or “incorrect” metricist. He is, on the contrary, a metrical artist of great accomplishment.
The conception of life revealed in his verses by this careful artist is one which displays very exactly the bent of his temperament. During the whole of his long career Mr. Hardy has not budged an inch from his original line of direction. He holds that, abandoned by God, treated with scorn by Nature, man lies helpless at the mercy of “those purblind Doomsters,” accident, chance, and time, from whom he has had to endure injury and insult from the cradle to the grave. This is stating the Hardy doctrine in its extreme form, but it is not stating it too strongly. This has been called his “pessimism,” a phrase to which some admirers, unwilling to give things their true name, have objected. But, of course, Mr. Hardy is a pessimist, just as Browning is an optimist, just as white is not black, and day is not night. Our juggling with words in paradox is too often apt to disguise a want of decision in thought. Let us admit that Mr. Hardy’s conception of the fatal forces which beleaguer human life is a “pessimistic” one, or else words have no meaning.
Yet it is needful to define in what this pessimism consists. It is not the egotism of Byron or the morbid melancholy of Chateaubriand. It is directed towards an observation of others, not towards an analysis of self, and this gives it more philosophical importance, because although romantic peevishness is very common among modern poets, and although ennui inspires a multitude of sonnets, a deliberate and imaginative study of useless suffering in the world around us is rare indeed among the poets. It is particularly to be noted that Mr. Hardy, although one of the most profoundly tragic of all modern writers, is neither effeminate nor sickly. His melancholy could never have dictated the third stanza of Shelley’s “Lines written in Dejection in the Bay of Naples.” His pessimism is involuntary, forced from him by his experience and his constitution, and no analysis could give a better definition of what divides him from the petulant despair of a poet like Leopardi than the lines “To Life”: —
“O life, with the sad scared face, I weary of seeing thee, And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobbling pace, And thy too-forced pleasantry!
“I know what thou would’st tell Of Death, Time, Destiny — I have known it long, and know, too, well What it all means for me.
“But canst thou not array Thyself in rare disguise, And feign like truth, for one mad day, That Earth is Paradise?
“I’ll tune me to the mood, And mumm
with thee till eve, And maybe what as interlude I feign, I shall believe!”
But the mumming goes no deeper than it does in the exquisite poem of “The Darkling Thrush,” where the carolings of an aged bird, on a frosty evening, are so ecstatic that they waken a vague hope in the listener’s mind that the thrush may possibly know of “some blessed hope” of which the poet is “unaware.” This is as far as Mr. Hardy ever gets on the blest Victorian pathway of satisfaction.
There are certain aspects in which it is not unnatural to see a parallel between Mr. Hardy and George Crabbe. Each is the spokesman of a district, each has a passion for the study of mankind, each has gained by long years of observation a profound knowledge of local human character, and each has plucked on the open moor, and wears in his coat, the hueless flower of disillusion. But there is a great distinction in the aim of the two poets. Crabbe, as he describes himself in The Parish Register, was “the true physician” who “walks the foulest ward.” He was utilitarian in his morality; he exposed the pathos of tragedy by dwelling on the faults which led to it, forgetful of the fatality which in more consistent moments he acknowledged. Crabbe was realistic with a moral design, even in the Tales of the Hall, where he made a gallant effort at last to arrive at a detachment of spirit. No such effort is needed by Mr. Hardy, who has none of the instinct of a preacher, and who considers moral improvement outside his responsibility. He admits, with his great French contemporary, that
“Tout désir est menteur, toute joie éphémère, Toute liqueur au fond de la coupe est amère,”
but he is bent on discovering the cause of this devastation, and not disposed to waste time over its consequences. At the end he produces a panacea which neither Crabbe nor Byron dreamed of — resignation.
