# The Life of Thomas Hardy (Brennecke)/Chapter 8

Layout 2
CHAPTER VIII
The Lyric Poet (1898-1922)
WHEN Hardy's first volume of poems, Wessex Poems, appeared in 1898, illustrated with sketches by the author, now approaching his sixtieth year, everyone was disposed to regard it as an interesting but not particularly valuable illustration of a great novelist's self-entertainment by means of incidental experiments with art and poetry. When, three years later, his next book proved to be Poems of the Past and the Present, readers began to suspect that his career as a novelist might have to be considered as definitely closed. The most current speculation as to the probable cause of this rather unexpected turn of affairs was that Hardy had been disgusted and disheartened by the adverse and hysterical criticism leveled against Jude. As it was humorously put in Max Beerbohm's burlesque Sequelula to The Dynasts:
Mr. Beerbohm really thought, however, that "to accept that explanation were to insult him. A puny engine of art may be derailed by such puny obstacles as the public can set in its way. So strong an engine as Mr. Hardy rushes straight on, despite them, never so little jarred by them, and stops not save for lack of inward steam. Mr. Hardy writes no more novels because he has no more novels to write."
The most reasonable explanation seems to be that Hardy, feeling that he had expressed himself in the form of prose fiction as well as he was ever likely to, and that he had sufficiently indulged the public in using for twenty-five years the most easily comprehended method of approach, decided that he would henceforth indulge ​himself by employing the form of literary art in which it had ever been his ambition to become a master. His novels had assured him of income and position; he could now afford to speculate in the hazardous field of poetry. Some people, indeed, had already realized that they had been reading poetry while they perused the "novels of character and environment," and accepted the new state of affairs with satisfaction. Others, however, simply stopped reading Hardy. At any rate, the world had before long to assimilate the fact that if it wanted to read Hardy's new books, it would have to read verse.
Poems of the Past and the Present, like Wessex Poems, contained many early pieces, but consisted chiefly of Hardy's poetical efforts between 1898 and 1901, recording his impressions of the Boer War and of two trips to Italy, the Poems of Pilgrimage. Time's Laughingstocks appeared in 1909; it was distinguished by A Set of Country Songs, some of the most successful dramatic ballads, the Love Lyrics and the greater part of those poems in which the ancient Wessex musicians reappear in person and in spirit. Satires of Circumstance followed in 1914; it has, without too much exaggeration, been called one of the most remarkable collections of poetry produced in recent years. It drew forth the following comment from Mr. Gosse:
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. The strongest of the poems of disillusion which are the outcome of his mood, is The Newcomer's Wife, with the terrible abruptness of its final stanza. . . . At all events, 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.
Whether or not this conjecture hits the truth of the matter, no one was prepared to deny that Satires of Circumstance, and in particular the "fifteen glimpses" that give the volume its title, produced upon the reader an effect of tragic pity and horror unequaled by anything else in the works of this modern master of tragedy, unless it be some of the more gruesome scenes in The Dynasts, or in Jude the Obscure. A tangible clue to the personal significance of the volume to its author was afforded by the memorable group of Poems of 1912-13, in which the death of Mrs. Hardy and the poet's bereavement were recorded with a beauty, pathos, and peculiar emotional restraint that frequently equals, and occasionally surpasses, the finest pieces done in a similar vein by Wordsworth. The volume also contained the famous lines on the loss of the Titanic, The Convergence of the Twain, and, as first published, closed with Hardy's first lyric of the Great War, Men Who March Away.
If Satires of Circumstance was the most sharply tragic of Hardy's books of lyrics, Moments of Vision rose to far greater heights in ripeness of thought, beauty of imagery, and perfection of form. Here Hardy at last achieved, with consummate artistry, that perfect adaptation of language and structure to the intellectual, dramatic, or lyric content of the poems, toward which he had ​striven since his earliest attempts at versification. It was a book that but few could enjoy at a first reading, but the strange rhythmic cadences, the seemingly perverse and distorted handling of the language, and the delicate and unusual variations on the Hardy-situations and the Hardy-philosophy that one learned to look for, finally exercised a charm that completely dispelled all memory of the impression of queerness that distracted the reader at first. Except for the collection of war-poems at the end, the book, as well as the Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), consisted entirely of miscellaneous and entirely undated pieces.
Although the characteristics noted above serve to distinguish the volumes from each other, these books present, in general, such uniform qualities in technique, material, and content, that a chronological arrangement of the later lyrics seems rather futile. To follow out such an arrangement would, at all events, be almost an impossibility, as Hardy took care to date but very few of his poems. It is all one can do to extricate the very early poems from the mass of the later, "post-fictional" material. Hardy's aims, both artistic and intellectual, have been singularly steady and consistent through his long career, and while his later work seems to show an increasing facility and sureness of touch, his objectives remain substantially the same as they were when he ceased merely experimenting and began to write poetry in earnest. One finds the same kind of criticism leveled at ​Moments of Vision that was first directed against Wessex Poems and then against The Dynasts, and one can find, to a lesser degree, in Wessex Poems many of the qualities that raise Satires of Circumstance and Moments of Vision to the rank of "great poetry."
Before attacking the subject-matter which the poet uses, or the aspect and inner significance of the poetic edifice he has raised, the questions connected with his purely technical qualifications for executing the tasks of a lyrist must be disposed of. The language, style, and verse-structure of Hardy's lyric poems have caused more than one critic and sincere reader to throw down his books and refuse to attempt to penetrate further into the mysteries of poetry that presented such an uncouth and forbidding exterior.
Hardy's choice and use of English words in his poems has provoked and irritated many a commentator, and is a subject that demands rather close and extended comment, in spite of the warning example of George Meredith's dull professor, who "pores over a little inexactitude in phrases and pecks at it like a domestic fowl." The guiding principle that is undoubtedly at the base of Hardy's handling of the language is that of using at all times the exact and precise word for the expression of an idea. The sense of a passage, whether of prose or verse, and the clearness of the picture or impression to be conveyed, are never to be sacrificed to the sound—to the purely sensory appeal of the language. This has been noticed even by readers of his prose, and has already been discovered to be one of his few definitely expressed tenets on the subject of poetic composition. It may be of ​some interest to compare this theory of Hardy's, and its application in his poems, with the first article in the creed of our present-day Imagist school, which reads: "To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word." With the latter—and more important—part of this fundamental tenet, Hardy is entirely in sympathy, but is his language that of common speech? In the novels, certainly. Nowhere in his prose, which is usually of a sublime simplicity, can one find such a monstrosity as this notorious and frequently quoted passage perpetrated by Meredith,—the speech of an eighteen-year-old girl: "We have met. It is more than I have merited. We part. In mercy let it be forever. Oh, terrible word! Coined by the passions of our youth, it comes to us for our sole riches when we are bankrupt of earthly treasures, and is the passport given by Abnegation unto Woe that prays to quit this probationary sphere."
But what of Hardy's verse? Let us open the Wessex Poems, or the Collected Poems, and glance at the very first stanza of the very first poem:
Certainly this is not the language of common, nor of uncommon, speech. There are those who will perhaps deny that it is language at all. The trouble does not lie in the fact that it is a rather unsuccessful attempt to ​make correct Sapphic stanzas sound smooth in English (which Swinburne proved could be done), but the perplexity of the reader begins before he has had time to recognize the metrical scheme. The word chancefulness stops him almost as soon as he begins to read. He then stumbles a bit over unchosen, but reads on, until stopped again by fellowlike. Upon repeated readings he will, if he is persistent, gradually divine the poet's meaning, grow accustomed to the curious cadences of the verse, and finally will experience a distinct pleasure in re-perusing the piece. The cardinal stumbling-block to an appreciation of Hardy's lyric poetry is undoubtedly the effort exacted of the reader by the seemingly uncouth words habitually employed. Trained linguists have observed, however, that Hardy is very rarely indeed responsible for the actual coinage or invention of a new word, and that in the few cases in which he produces a new form, it is invariably evolved logically out of established and known elements of the language. His practice is not, for the most part, that of word-manufacture, but of word-preservation. Unconsciously following the example of the celebrated Hariri and other Arabic poets and men of letters who devoted their lives to the preservation of their ancient language in all its marvellous flexibility, he attempts to enliven the English of modern poetry through the systematic but always felicitous introduction of antique and pseudo-antique forms and expressions. In the fulfilment of this aim he consistently reverts to the native, or Anglo-Saxon, element of the language, and very rarely resurrects an old French derivative. The hapax legomena of Hardy are almost ​invariably old English words, or, less frequently, direct descendants of Greek or Latin originals.
This Teutonic, as distinguished from the Celtic or Romance viewpoint with regard to the history and future development of English is not without some significance for the study of Hardy's larger "Weltanschauung." Again we discover his spirit to be en rapport with the ancient inhabitants of Wessex, the genius of whose country has always exercised such a firm hold upon him.
Among critics it was fashionable, until a very short time ago, to point the finger of scorn at Hardy's efforts in versification. His technique as a prose-novelist has always evoked admiration for its purity and sureness of touch, but these qualities do not seem to have been so easily discoverable in his poetry. Even so acute an appraiser of contemporary literature as Richard Le Gallienne, while admitting Hardy's claim to greatness, dismissed his verse by calling it "poetry-in-travail rather than poetry delivered." Lawrence Binyon probed the matter somewhat more deeply, when he observed that the mechanism of a Hardy-stanza "creaks and, groans with the pressure of its working," and that "there is something incongruous between the prosaic plainness of speech and the tight structure of the rather elaborate lyric form to which it is trimmed." The recognition of Hardy's merits and demerits as a versifier will, perhaps fortunately, depend ultimately on the examples of his art that he has himself produced, rather than on the hastily formed opinions of his first readers.
No one will ever claim for Hardy's poetry the golden melody of a Shelley or a Burns, nor the symphonic splen​dor of sound that belongs to the works of Keats and Swinburne; he makes no direct appeal to the ear of his reader. But after repeated readings of his lyrics the first fantastic grotesqueness of effect wears off, leaving at times a fascinatingly pungent quality that is seen finally to be the inevitable medium for the thought that is expressed. His more prosy lyrics should not be viewed as wilful distortions of set and elaborate measures, but should be read as naturally as is consistent with the preservation of their symmetry. Then, as the syncopations, misplaced quantities and compensations outnumber the consonances, the effect will approach that of free verse and prose-poetry. In its rhythmic freedom, and in its forsaking of sweetness of melody for its own sake, Hardy's mature poetry is perhaps analogous to the work of many modern musicians, who are indulging in unheard-of dissonances, and whose rhythmic complexities have broken away from all metronomic restraints.
There seems to be little doubt that the natural and free forms of Oriental poetry have recently made a tremendous impress upon contemporary poets, whose work has heretofore been of strictly geometric patterns, both simple and complex. The unforced cadences of speech are perhaps winning the fight over the old-fashioned artificiality too easily for the health of the art—but there is no danger if the contest is really between the mechanical, straight-edged architecture of man and the unconscious artistry of nature. However that may be, Hardy's sense of form, developed by his earliest profession and applied throughout a long career of prose-writing, did not forsake him when he turned to composition in verse. He ​took hold of the traditional rigid molds and poured into them his seething feeling and vital thought. Occasionally the very vitality of his message distorted or smashed the formal pattern chosen—but the result was not then necessarily inartistic, because the tortured verse often expressed a torturing and grinding philosophy. It cannot be said that he advocated formal freedom, thereby allying himself with the younger radical poets, but he frequently smashed the old forms, perhaps unintentionally, and produced something that is as new and fresh as the latest of the "new voices," and much freer from absurdity. Above all things, his form was perfectly suited to his subject-matter.
The reader of Hardy's lyrics was amazed no less by the variety of material and idea he encountered than by the variety of formal expression. He approached the books with a slight feeling of dread—anticipating an endless succession of fruitless "lucubrations over the social rubric" and dismal speculations on the purposelessness of the universe. He found, indeed, the expected Hardy-philosophy, expressed with an accentuation rather than a softening of the ideas that keep the Hardy-novels on the shelves of public libraries rather than in the hands of the readers. But he found also a poet—even though he was a cosmic poet and made no pretensions to be anything else—who was exceedingly responsive to the life that seethes about him for whom the flavor of events and experiences was a thing in which no less pure delight was to be found because its significance in a larger ​scheme of things was also comprehended. There was no experience and no event too trivial, and none too imposing, to find a record in Hardy's lyrics. The whole range of his interests and of his ideas achieved expression here, as well as his immediate imaginative reaction to events of the time, nowhere recorded in his prose works.
Some of these poems showed Hardy in an entirely new light—that of a "laureate" poet; but the most obviously "occasional" pieces demonstrated once for all the fact that that official distinction could never be his.
The passing of Edward VII and the accession of the present George called forth two notable poems. For A King's Soliloquy—On the Night of His Funeral was a lament over the unfruitfulness, "the days of drudgery, the nights of stress" of the life of a monarch, even when he is determined to get the best of all the enjoyments that his extraordinary opportunities put within his reach;—the "average track of average men" is to be preferred—and the poem ends on a fatalistic note:
The Coronation was a most extraordinary working-out of an idea that might have been molded into a masterpiece. The older rulers of the island are awakened by the noises of the erection of the temporary scaffolding for the ceremony at Westminster, and speculate on the significance of the disturbance. The reader speculates ​just as vainly on the meaning, or "point" of the poem itself, and the crudity, both of expression and of technique, is apt to cause some embarrassment to the Hardy-enthusiast. Here is a choice selection of the royal dialogue:
One does not wonder that patriotic British journals did not scramble for Hardy's poetical comment on news of the day;—what would the average Londoner have thought of his morning paper, if, on the day after the coronation, "Eliza" had "squeaked" at him from the printed lines that represented the laureate's celebration of the event? . . . To say nothing of the gracelessness ​of bringing in "Hal" and his notoriously complex domestic problems. The whole poem was a most unusual thing to find in Hardy: an example of really bad work. A sudden and complete transition from the ridiculous to the sublime may be effected by turning to examine another occasional poem, the lines of the loss of the "Titanic," The Convergence of the Twain. From the first stanza,
to the last,
the language and the thought achieve an exaltation and a grandeur that touch the heart of the reader more forcibly and tellingly than any more sensational or sentimental treatment of the theme could possibly do. Here the "Immanent Will, that stirs and urges everything" definitely displaced the poet's earlier and more awkward conception of Chance and Time as agents of Destiny.
The ballads of the Napoleonic wars found in the Wessex Poems represent Hardy's continued interest in a theme that had already occasioned The Trumpet-Major and was eventually to find its consummation in The Dynasts. Edmund Gosse wrote that they were conceived, and a few lines written, long before their completion. ​Certainly they represent their author's most spontaneous work, and have drawn admiration when his other poems only succeeded in drawing sneers or other more vigorous tokens of hostility. One of the first reviewers of Wessex Poems went so far as to express a belief that Hardy could possibly do a great historical romance on the Napoleonic wars.
Leipzig, the tale of the taking of the city by the Allies in 1813, told by "old Norbert with the flat blue cap" on an evening in the master-tradesman's parlor at the Old Ship Tun at Casterbridge, is remarkable for its dramatic handling of the event that was to form the bulk of Act III of the third part of The Dynasts; for its swiftness of movement and vividness of expression that anticipated much of the vigor of execution so notably characteristic of the later poems, and for its iterated emphasis on the poet's disillusioned view of warfare:
San Sebastian, again a dramatic monologue, stresses the sordid and horrid aspects of war—it is a tale of the undying remorse that clings to the spirit of a man who has committed outrages such as always accompany the taking and plundering of towns when the soldiery are released from control. The Peasant's Confession, likewise a tale of remorse, takes us to the field of Waterloo, and explains the failure of Grouchy to arrive on the field in time by the fact that Napoleon's messenger was be​trayed and slain by a treacherous peasant. Five full stanzas are devoted to a Homeric or Æschylean catalogue of the noted fallen—a mere enumeration of the names of familiar and unfamiliar heroes. It will be seen that this is an anticipation of the technique of The Dynasts. The dramatic quality of the story is vividly reflected in the speed and the broken rhythms of the verses. The Alarm was based, like many an episode in The Trumpet-Major, on an actual Hardy-family tradition dealing with Bonaparte's threatened invasion of England, when all the country was in a fever of excitement and preparation.
In contrast to these poems, based on history and local legend, were those occasioned by Hardy's own experiences and observations in times of war. The "War-Poems" in Poems of the Past and the Present were written at various times during the Boer War, and give a picture of that struggle as viewed from Southampton, London, and Wessex. The first thing that one realizes after a mere glance through this group is that, for all his philosophic generalization, Hardy was by no means insensible to the external picturesqueness of the military spectacles he witnessed. The colorful excitement of embarcation scenes, the tramp of a battery through rain and mud, with wives and sweethearts trudging alongside as best they may, the crowds about the war-office watching the bulletins,—all these impressions are recorded. Nor was he less alive to the inevitable and natural emotions aroused in the crowds through the stirring up of the spirit of patriotism and of the love of adventure that is a part of everyone's nature. Soldierly enthusiasm ​coupled with, soldierly fatalism and soldierly melancholy, breathes through the lines of The Colonel's Soliloquy. The many splendid dramatic possibilities were not overlooked by any means; witness The Going of the Battery and Song of the Soldiers' Wives and Sweethearts, which make their readers live through the anguish of parting and the joy of meeting. The irony of events is here represented by the characteristic A Wife in London, in which the poor unfortunate receives on one day a cablegram announcing the death of her husband, and on the next a letter from him, full of rosy hopes and plans for the future.
To the realization of the essentially tragic quality of events as they affect individuals he added the disillusive conclusions about war that force themselves upon the unimpassioned thinker when the superficial excitement induced by the "herd instinct" has worn off. On Christmas-eve, in 1899, the poet wondered at the inconsistency of tacking "Anno Domini" to the years that were as yet unilluminated by that spirit of peace for which Christ died; and the souls of the slain, in another poem written at the same time, rushing homeward like the Pentecost-Wind, discover to their dismay that they are remembered for their homely and commonplace characteristics rather than for their words and deeds of military prowess. Hardy already longed for the time when saner, softer policies would prevail, and patriotism scorn to stand "bond-slave to realms, but circle earth and seas," in the universal brotherhood of man. How far was this spirit of lovingkindness removed from the imperialistic bluster of Kipling!—who, with all his genius, never once ​achieved the wonderful suggestion, accomplished by the employment of simple, dignified, and rhythmical language, of such a poem as Drummer Hodge:
The Sick God closed these Boer-War poems. Here the delicious feeling of relief upon the conclusion of peace and the cessation of familiar horrors, led Hardy to the supposition that the growth of sanity and loving fellowship in humanity, (or, to translate it into the language of the Hardy-philosophy—the growth of consciousness in the all-pervading Immanent Will) was gradually bringing about a lack of interest in the art of war and an increasing feeling of disgust at its methods. Men, he felt, ​were beginning to estimate the ancient pomp and circumstance of the military spirit at its true value:
Unfortunately, this note of melioristic optimism was proved to be based on fallacious foundations by the events that followed. It was, perhaps, the general feeling after a second-rate war, but it is a feeling that seems to wear off with extreme rapidity under the stress of the clash of dynasties. Hardy here unconsciously—and therefore, perhaps, most effectively—illustrated the irony of circumstance. The author of Men Who March Away must have realized what a scurvy trick Time had played upon him in making a "laughingstock" of The Sick God.
In the year before the outbreak of the Great War Hardy wrote the poem called His Country, expressing his transcendental view of the idea of patriotism. The synopses of all the stanzas running through marginal notes read as follows: "He travels southward and looks around; and cannot discover the boundary of his native country; or where his duties to his fellow-creatures end; nor where are his enemies." The last stanza reads:
Thus runs the poem in its final state, as found in the Collected Poems. On its first appearance in Satires of Circumstance, however, it bore the note "Written before the War," possibly to defend the rather patent cynicism of the original final stanza, omitted in the definitive edition, in which "he is set right by a wise man who pities his blindness," and which reads:
It is futile to speculate on the reasons why a writer who had the courage to publish Jude, and, during the war, The Pity of It, should have seen fit to "censor" this original conclusion to the poem. So let us proceed to the blasts of the Hardyan bugle that accompanied the early stages of the greatest Historical Calamity, or Conflict of Peoples—to quote from the Preface of The Dynasts—"artificially brought about in our own times."
As might have been expected of a man of seventy-four, Hardy in this later group was no longer attracted by the merely picturesque aspects of war. His utter repugnance to the methods of modern warfare was strongly brought out in Then and Now (1915), which set in con​trast the gentlemen-warriors of earlier days, with their elevated conceptions of honor, and the contemporary Herods, who breathe:
The one enduring feature of all his war-poetry was his continual praise of the simple heart and the simple faith of the common soldier who neither instigates hatred nor philosophizes about it, but who does the fighting, feels the pain of it all, and uncomplainingly makes the best of it. The "Song of the Soldiers," Men Who March Away, written September 5, 1914, gave poignant expression to the natural and unforced patriotic faith and fire that burn in the hearts of those who are ready to die for their belief that "Victory crowns the just." Instinctive insular patriotism continued to exercise its sway over Hardy even so late as 1917, when we find him writing A Call to National Service, a sonnet that urged his countrymen on to unceasing efforts even though the struggle was bringing forth signs of exhaustion;—it shows the really tremendous strength of his patriotic instincts, that overwhelmed completely his finely wrought transcendental schemes for the "brotherhood of man." England to Germany in 1914 likewise concluded with the sort of sentiment that one expects from the orator who appeals to the national spirit of his audience. Yet one can hardly say that Hardy ever clearly or forcibly sounded the note of hatred of enemies.
​The whole group of war-poems ends on a rather forbidding note: the poet's vigorous renunciation of the instinctive joy in life that makes him "want to write a book" in a world so full of horrors that the truly wise man should want to drown himself as did the father of a son slain in battle.
A remarkable complexity of emotion and ratiocination was here exhibited. Loyalty to his native country and indignation against her enemies alternated with feelings of horror at the suffering and misery caused by the irrational patriotic impulse—at one time jingoism was suggested; at another, pacificism. Taken as a whole, they are a most illuminating reflection of the confused spirit and temper of the time. In The Dynasts also, although the setting is that of the Napoleonic wars, we may discover an "occasional" tendency. Again the mental situation of the world at the opening of the new century is represented by the complexity of ideas and feelings exhibited in the dilemmas that one inevitably finds inherent in the work—the natural human passion and patriotic fervor of the poet—an Englishman in spite of himself—frequently run away with the wider, deeper, and more richly colored, but purely intellectual predetermined philosophical program. This is felt particularly in the Prologue and the Epilogue composed for the first public performance of parts of The Dynasts in 1914.
Another type of occasional poetry found in the Hardy-volumes is that of the lyric obituary. Mention has already been made of the poems written upon the death of Meredith, and of Swinburne, of Barnes, and of Hardy's own grandmother. To these might be added The Abbey ​Mason, written in memory of his old architectural master, John Hicks of Dorchester, although it is merely a re-telling of an old legend and has no connection with Hicks other than its treatment of an architectural theme. But by far the most important, significant, and intrinsically valuable poetry of this kind is to be discovered in the Poems of 1912-13.
Late in 1912 Mrs. Hardy died most unexpectedly and after an extremely brief illness—"without ceremony," as the title of one of the poems expresses it. After the first shock of bereavement had spent its force, the poet proceeded to console himself by seeking refuge from the world of fact and retiring to the world of art, where his spirit might be refreshed by an indulgence in the untrammeled expression of its woes. The result was a series of poems that stand as his supreme achievement in the vein of pure lyric. Full of life, pity, and genuine feeling, they are more deeply and sincerely emotional, although more sober in tone, as a rule, than the purely imaginary situations elsewhere treated. Occasionally a particularly wistful or pathetic touch will recall the Wordsworth of the "Lucy" poems, hut as a whole these veteris vestigia flammae are as distinctively individual as anything that this most individual poet has ever done. Without being logically connected together to form a symmetrical or compact unit, they present a fairly consistent record of a mood of bereavement, uncomforted by any hope of personal survival or reunion after death, but softened by reminiscences of past hours of blissful felicity.
The most imaginative of these poems, and the one that ​exhibits the poet's "transcendental" tendencies in fullest and richest fashion is The Phantom Horsewoman, which shows also the great variety of the effects that the remembrance of that memorable ride together, with which the poet's mind seems obsessed, can produce. In contrast to this is The Spell of the Rose, which, with its perfectly transparent allegory, comes closest to an actual record of events—the course of a domestic disagreement and partial reconciliation is clearly suggested.
The most pathetic reflective piece is Rain on a Grave, but an equally fine, though different, effect is achieved by the coldest poem of the set, A Circular, which shows admirably how pure thought can transfigure an ordinary occurrence into real poetry:
In strong contrast to the austerity and frigidity of that, there is The Voice, as close an approach to a purely emotional overflow as Hardy ever achieved, and for that ​reason, perhaps, one of the most easily comprehensible of his poems.
The effect of the whole series can not be reproduced by the citation of extracts and examples: the poems should be read, preferably at one sitting.
Hardy's special fields of interest,—all his "hobbies"—both artistic and scientific, can be traced as easily through his lyric poems as through his prose writings. If we now look into his poetry for expressions of his philosophical outlook upon human life and its significance in the general scheme of the universe, we shall find a most unexpected richness of material. Even without ​taking into account The Dynasts, the avowed complete poetical and dramatic interpretation of the essentials of the Hardy world-view, we may discover in the philosophical lyrics a system of thought more complete, more consistent, and more compactly and pungently presented than in any or all of his novels. The essence of Hardy's thought and the centre of his artistic conceptions are, after all, a very general and universal conception of man's destiny rather than a minute picture of a strictly limited section of English countryside, which is developed merely as a vehicle for the presentation of something infinitely larger.
One aspect of the Hardy-viewpoint should be mentioned here, as it partially vindicates his claim to be regarded as a lyric poet. Great lyric poetry, according to Shelley, records "the happiest moments of the happiest souls." With this inspiring sentiment in mind, it is well to remember that there were times when Hardy felt an undeniable delight in life and that he frequently gives the lie to all his intellectual renunciative convictions. As he himself said, we are all "unreasoning, sanguine visionary." Not only did he "long to hold as truth what fancy saith," but he often could not help admitting that memory is better than oblivion, and Time, with all his tricks, preferable to no-time. His idealistic errantry overcame his cynicism, and he bravely followed his star. Even his conception of the Will admitted a hope that informing and merciful consciousness might come with the passage of the years, just as man's inhumanity to man may be overcome by the gradual rooting out of remedi​able evils—but the abiding love of life and of all that belongs to it, as expressed in the poem Great Things, remains his ultimate apology for producing lyric poetry:
Until recently, the poetry of Thomas Hardy has been very generally ignored, and when noticed at all, usually vastly underestimated. Ardent propagandists have been arising of late, however, and at present some of the ablest critics have shown themselves as eager champions of the veteran poet. William Archer, Edmund Gosse, and Clement Shorter formed a triumvirate of whole-hearted admirers from the start, in 1898. Alfred Noyes grew very enthusiastic over The Dynasts and the later lyrics, while Max Beerbohm, for all his flippant manner, failed to hide a considerable admiration for the great "Epic-Drama." In the United States two of the most distinguished of the newer poets have joined in regarding Hardy as the only Englishman with any real claim to be considered a great figure in the world of poetry. They are Edwin Arlington Bobinson, the representative of the more austere and restrained style of contemporary poetic composition, and John Gould Fletcher, one of the "Imagist" leaders, who has written this of Hardy:
He has illustrated his vision to the world by writing poetry so beautiful, so weighty with idea and expression, that to turn to it from the rhymes of the Georgians, or from the vers-libristie efforts of more futuristic singers, is like turning to Bach or Beethoven from the efforts of a rag-time band.
Whether or not the world of to-day will be found justified in showing itself far more grateful for Thomas Hardy's novels than for his poems, there is no doubt about his own opinion in the matter: in his poetry he has consummated his earliest and latest literary ambition. General opinion agrees with Dr. William Lyon Phelps, ​who, in commenting on the seeming strangeness of the judgments of authors about their own work, remarks: "Thomas Hardy firmly believes that his poems are much greater than The Return of the Native and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. But I do not care what he thinks so long as we have his masterpieces of fiction." One cannot dispute what is perhaps a question of personal taste, but on the other hand statements like the following, continually encountered among those to whom Hardy's poems are still a novelty, are calculated to raise the ire of those whose judgments agree with Hardy's own:
Mr. Hardy is a novelist who remains a novelist, more or less, in his verse; there is always drama lurking in it somewhere. He very rarely, one concludes, writes verse from any strong lyrical impulse, though now and then there are beautiful and surprising lyrical touches. . . . Meredith—to whom Mr. Hardy pays a noble tribute in this volume (Time's Laughingstocks)—was essentially and almost primarily a poet; to Mr. Hardy the verse form is rather experimental than inevitable.
It is hardly necessary to point out or comment on the perfectly absurd mixing up of literary genera in the first sentence of the foregoing criticism; and Meredith and Hardy, so different in spirit, the one representing the comic tradition running back through the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the other reaching back through the pure tragic tradition of Othello and Prometheus Bound, can hardly be compared as to the quality of their poetry.
Over against this sort of high-handed depreciation of Hardy's poetry, which may sometimes be partly due to over-enthusiastic appreciation of his fiction, one finds ​with surprise the exact reverse of such judgment coming from Coventry Patmore, who, as early as March 29th, 1875, wrote to Hardy to express his regret that "such almost unequalled beauty and power as appeared in the novels should not have assured themselves the immortality which would have been conferred upon them by the form of verse."
Without attempting a dogmatic opinion on a matter which will be decided by future generations, if at all, one may perhaps with a show of reason point out a possible analogy between the form assumed by the bulk of Mr. Hardy's productions and by Goethe's works. Both created transcendent novels and remarkable lyrical poems, but concentrated the sustained efforts of many years upon the production of one great piece of cosmic poetry;—in the one case Faust was the result, in the other The Dynasts. Without following out the analogy too closely or attempting to judge the final relative merit of the two poets, perhaps impossible at present, we may possibly be aided somewhat in our attempted estimate of the relative importance of the works of Hardy by observing the manner in which posterity has rated those of Goethe.