estimate of the man who lives and has his being in his published works,
we reply that it shifts the emphasis. An amusingly wrong-headed book
about Homer is a peccadillo; ten years of life lavished upon it is
something a good deal more serious. And even _The Way of all Flesh_,
which as an experimental novel is a very considerable achievement,
becomes something different when we have to regard it as a laborious and
infinitely careful record of experienced fact. Further still, even the
edge of the perfected inconsequence of certain of the 'Notes' is
somewhat dulled when we see the trick of it being exercised. The origin
of the amusing remark on Blake, who 'was no good because he learnt
Italian at over 60 in order to read Dante, and we know Dante was no good
because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because
Tennyson ran him--well, Tennyson goes without saying,' is to be found in
'No, I don't like Lamb. You see, Canon Ainger writes about him, and
Canon Ainger goes to tea with my aunts.' Repeated, it becomes merely a
clever way of being stupid, as we should be if we were tempted to say
we couldn't bear Handel, because Butler was mad on him, and Butler was
no good because he was run by Mr Jones, and, well, Mr Jones goes without
saying.
Nevertheless, though Butler lives with much discomfort and some danger
in Mr Jones's tabernacle, he does continue to live. What his head loses
by the inquisition of a biography his heart gains, though we wonder
whether Butler himself would have smiled upon the exchange. Butler loses
almost the last vestige of a title to be considered a creative artist
when the incredible fact is revealed that the letters of Theobald and
Christina in _The Way of all Flesh_ are merely reproduced from those
which his father and mother sent him. Nor was Butler, even as a copyist,
always adequate to his originals. The brilliantly witty letters of Miss
Savage, by which the first volume is made precious, seem to us to
indicate a real woman upon whom something more substantial might have
been modelled than the delightful but evanescent picture of Alethea
Pontifex. Here, at least, is a picture of Miss Savage and Butler
together which, to our sense, gives some common element in both which
escaped the expression of the author of _The Way of all Flesh_:--
'I like the cherry-eating scene, too [Miss Savage wrote after
reading the MS. of _Alps and Sanctuaries_], because it reminded me
of your eating cherries when I first knew you. One day when I was
going to the gallery, a very hot day I remember, I met you on the
shady side of Berners Street, eating cherries out of a basket. Like
your Italian friends, you were perfectly silent with content, and
you handed the basket to me as I was passing, without saying a word.
I pulled out a handful and went on my way rejoicing, without saying
a word either. I had not before perceived you to be different from
any one else. I was like Peter Bell and the primrose with the yellow
brim. As I went away to France a day or two after that and did not
see you again for months, the recollection of you as you were eating
cherries in Berners Street abode with me and pleased me greatly.'
Again, we feel that the unsubstantial Towneley of the novel should have
been more like flesh and blood when we learn that he too was drawn from
the life, and from a life which was intimately connected with Butler's.
Here, most evidently, the heart gains what the head loses, for the story
of Butler's long-suffering generosity to Charles Paine Pauli is almost
beyond belief and comprehension. Butler had met Pauli, who was two years
his junior, in New Zealand, and had conceived a passionate admiration
for him. Learning that he desired to read for the bar, Butler, who had
made an unexpected success of his sheep-farming, offered to lend him
£100 to get to England and £200 a year until he was called. Very shortly
after they both arrived in England, Pauli separated from Butler,
refusing even to let him know his address, and thenceforward paid him
one brief visit every day. He continued, however, to draw his allowance
regularly until his death all through the period when, owing to the
failure of Butler's investments, £200 seems to have been a good deal
more than one-half Butler's income. At Pauli's death in 1897 Butler
discovered what he must surely at moments have suspected, that Pauli had
been making between £500 and £800 at the bar, and had left about
£9000--not to Butler. Butler wrote an account of the affair after
Pauli's death which is strangely self-revealing:--
'... Everything that he had was good, and he was such a fine
handsome fellow, with such an attractive manner that to me he seemed
everything I should like myself to be, but knew very well that I was
not....
'I had felt from the very beginning that my intimacy with Pauli was
only superficial, and I also perceived more and more that I bored
him.... He liked society and I hated it. Moreover, he was at times
very irritable and would find continual fault with me; often, I have
no doubt, justly, but often, as it seemed to me, unreasonably.
Devoted to him as I continued to be for many years, those years were
very unhappy as well as very happy ones.
'I set down a great deal to his ill-health, no doubt truly; a great
deal more, I was sure, was my own fault--and I am so still; I
excused much on the score of his poverty and his dependence on
myself--for his father and mother, when it came to the point, could
do nothing for him; I was his host and was bound to forbear on that
ground if on no other. I always hoped that, as time went on, and he
saw how absolutely devoted to him I was, and what unbounded
confidence I had in him, and how I forgave him over and over again
for treatment which I would not have stood for a moment from any
one else--I always hoped that he would soften and deal as frankly
and unreservedly with me as I with him; but, though for some fifteen
years I hoped this, in the end I gave it up, and settled down into a
resolve from which I never departed--to do all I could for him, to
avoid friction of every kind, and to make the best of things for him
and myself that circumstances would allow.'
In love such as this there is a feminine tenderness and devotion which
positively illuminates what otherwise appears to be a streak of
perversity in Butler; and the illumination becomes still more certain
when we read Butler's letters to the young Swiss, Hans Faesch, to whom
_Out into the Night_ was written. Faesch had departed for Singapore.
'The sooner we all of us,' wrote Butler, 'as men of sense and sober
reason, get through the very acute, poignant sorrow which we now
feel, the better for us all. There is no fear of any of us
forgetting when the acute stage is passed. I should be ashamed of
myself for having felt as keenly and spoken with as little reserve
as I have if it were any one but you; but I feel no shame at any
length to which grief can take me when it is about you. I can call
to mind no word which ever passed between us three which had been
better unspoken: no syllable of irritation or unkindness; nothing
but goodness and kindness ever came out of you, and such as our best
was we gave it to you as you gave yours to us. Who may not well be
plunged up to the lips in sorrow at parting from one of whom he can
say this in all soberness and truth? I feel as though I had lost an
only son with no hope of another....'
The love is almost pathetically lavish. Letters like these reveal to us
a man so avid of affection that he must of necessity erect every barrier
and defence to avoid a mortal wound. His sensibility was _rentrée_,
probably as a consequence of his appalling childhood; and the indication
helps us to understand not only the inordinate suspiciousness with which
he behaved to Darwin, but the extent to which irony was his favoured
weapon. The most threatening danger for such a man is to take the
professions of the world at their face value; he can inoculate himself
only by irony. The more extreme his case, the more devouring the hunger
to love and be loved, the more extreme the irony, and in Butler it
reached the absolute maximum, which is to interpret the professions of
the world as their exact opposite. As a reviewer of the _Note-Books_ in
_The Athenæum_ recently said, Butler's method was to stand propositions
on their heads. He universalised his method; he applied it not merely to
scientific propositions of fact, but, even more ruthlessly, to the
converse of daily life. He divided up the world into a vast majority who
meant the opposite of what they said, and an infinitesimal minority who
were sincere. The truth that the vast majority are borderland cases
escaped him, largely because he was compelled by his isolation to regard
all his honest beliefs as proven certainties. That a man could like and
admire him and yet regard him as in many things mistaken and
wrong-headed was strictly incomprehensible to him, and from this angle
the curious relations which existed between him and Dr Richard Garnett
of the British Museum are of uncommon interest. They afford a strange
example of mutual mystification.
Thus at least one-half the world, not of life only (which does not
greatly matter, for one can live as happily with half the world as with
the whole) but of thought, was closed to him. Most of the poetry, the
music, and the art of the world was humbug to him, and it was only by
insisting that Homer and Shakespeare were exactly like himself that he
managed to except them from his natural aversion. So, in the last
resort, he humbugged himself quite as vehemently as he imagined the
majority of men were engaged in humbugging him. If his standard of truth
was higher than that of the many, it was lower than that of the few.
There is a kingdom where the crass division into sheep and goats is
merely clumsy and inopportune. In the slow meanderings of this _Memoir_
we too often catch a glimpse of Butler measuring giants with the
impertinent foot-rule of his common sense. One does not like him the
less for it, but it is, in spite of all the disconcerting jokes with
which it may be covered, a futile and ridiculous occupation.
Persistently there emerges from the record the impression of something
childish, whether in petulance or _gaminerie_, a crudeness as well as a
shrewdness of judgment and ideal. Where Butler thought himself complete,
he was insufficient; and where he thought himself insufficient, he was
complete. To himself he appeared a hobbledehoy by the side of Pauli; to
us he appears a hobbledehoy by the side of Miss Savage.
[OCTOBER, 1919.
_The Poetry of Mr Hardy_
One meets fairly often with the critical opinion that Mr Hardy's poetry
is incidental. It is admitted on all sides that his poetry has curious
merits of its own, but it is held to be completely subordinate to his
novels, and those who maintain that it must be considered as having
equal standing with his prose, are not seldom treated as guilty of
paradox and preciousness.
We are inclined to wonder, as we review the situation, whether those of
the contrary persuasion are not allowing themselves to be impressed
primarily by mere bulk, and arguing that a man's chief work must
necessarily be what he has done most of; and we feel that some such
supposition is necessary to explain what appears to us as a visible
reluctance to allow Mr Hardy's poetry a clean impact upon the critical
consciousness. It is true that we have ranged against us critics of
distinction, such as Mr Lascelles Abercrombie and Mr Robert Lynd, and
that it may savour of impertinence to suggest that the case could have
been unconsciously pre-judged in their minds when they addressed
themselves to Mr Hardy's poetry. Nevertheless, we find some significance
in the fact that both these critics are of such an age that when they
came to years of discretion the Wessex Novels were in existence as a
_corpus_. There, before their eyes, was a monument of literary work
having a unity unlike that of any contemporary author. The poems became
public only after they had laid the foundations of their judgment. For
them Mr Hardy's work was done. Whatever he might subsequently produce
was an interesting, but to their criticism an otiose appendix to his
prose achievement.
It happens therefore that to a somewhat younger critic the perspective
may be different. By the accident of years it would appear to him that
Mr Hardy's poetry was no less a _corpus_ than his prose. They would be
extended equally and at the same moment before his eyes; he would embark
upon voyages of discovery into both at roughly the same time; and he
might find, in total innocence of preciousness and paradox, that the
poetry would yield up to him a quality of perfume not less essential
than any that he could extract from the prose.
This is, as we see it, the case with ourselves. We discover all that our
elders discover in Mr Hardy's novels; we see more than they in his
poetry. To our mind it exists superbly in its own right; it is not
lifted into significance upon the glorious substructure of the novels.
They also are complete in themselves. We recognise the relation between
the achievements, and discern that they are the work of a single mind;
but they are separate works, having separate and unique excellences. The
one is only approximately explicable in terms of the other. We incline,
therefore, to attach a signal importance to what has always seemed to us
the most important sentence in _Who's Who?_--namely, that in which Mr
Hardy confesses that in 1868 he was compelled--that is his own word--to
give up writing poetry for prose.
For Mr Hardy's poetic gift is not a late and freakish flowering. In the
volume into which has been gathered all his poetical work with the
exception of 'The Dynasts,'[12] are pieces bearing the date 1866 which
display an astonishing mastery, not merely of technique but of the
essential content of great poetry. Nor are such pieces exceptional.
Granted that Mr Hardy has retained only the finest of his early poetry,
still there are a dozen poems of 1866-7 which belong either entirely or
in part to the category of major poetry. Take, for instance, 'Neutral
Tones':--
'We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
--They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
'Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles long ago;
And some winds played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.
'The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing....
'Since then keen lessons that love deceives
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.'
[Footnote 12: _Collected. Poems of Thomas Hardy_. Vol. I.
(Macmillan.)]
That was written in 1867. The date of _Desperate Remedies_, Mr Hardy's
first novel, was 1871. _Desperate Remedies_ may have been written some
years before. It makes no difference to the astonishing contrast between
the immaturity of the novel and the maturity of the poem. It is surely
impossible in the face of such a juxtaposition then to deny that Mr
Hardy's poetry exists in its own individual right, and not as a curious
simulacrum of his prose.
These early poems have other points of deep interest, of which one of
the chief is in a sense technical. One can trace a quite definite
influence of Shakespeare's sonnets in his language and imagery. The four
sonnets, 'She to Him' (1866), are full of echoes, as:--
'Numb as a vane that cankers on its point
True to the wind that kissed ere canker came.'
or this from another sonnet of the same year:--
'As common chests encasing wares of price
Are borne with tenderness through halls of state.'
Yet no one reading the sonnets of these years can fail to mark the
impress of an individual personality. The effect is, at times, curious
and impressive in the extreme. We almost feel that Mr Hardy is bringing
some physical compulsion to bear on Shakespeare and forcing him to say
something that he does not want to say. Of course, it is merely a
curious tweak of the fancy; but there comes to us in such lines as the
following an insistent vision of two youths of an age the one
masterful, the other indulgent, and carrying out his companion's firm
suggestion:--
'Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame
That Sportsman Time rears but his brood to kill,
Knowing me in my soul the very same--
One who would die to spare you touch of ill!--
Will you not grant to old affection's claim
The hand of friendship down Life's sunless hill?'
But, fancies aside, the effect of these early poems is twofold. Their
attitude is definite:--
'Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain
And dicing time for gladness calls a moan ...
These purblind Doomsters had as readily thrown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.'
and the technique has the mark of mastery, a complete economy of
statement which produces the conviction that the words are saying only
what poet ordained they should say, neither less nor more.
The early years were followed by the long period of the novels, in
which, we are prepared to admit, poetry was actually if not in intention
incidental. It is the grim truth that poetry cannot be written in
between times; and, though we have hardly any dates on which to rely, we
are willing to believe that few of Mr Hardy's characteristic poems were
written between the appearance of _Desperate Remedies_ and his farewell
to the activity of novel-writing with _The Well-Beloved_ (1897). But the
few dates which we have tell us that 'Thoughts of Phena,' the beautiful
poem beginning:--
'Not a line of her writing have I,
Not a thread of her hair....'
which reaches forward to the love poems of 1912-13, was written in 1890.
Whether the development of Mr Hardy's poetry was concealed or visible
during the period of the novels, development there was into a maturity
so overwhelming that by its touchstone the poetical work of his famous
contemporaries appears singularly jejune and false. But, though by the
accident of social conditions--for that Mr Hardy waited till 1898 to
publish his first volume of poems is more a social than an artistic
fact--it is impossible to follow out the phases of his poetical progress
in the detail we would desire, it is impossible not to recognise that
the mature poet, Mr Hardy, is of the same poetical substance as the
young poet of the 'sixties. The attitude is unchanged; the modifications
of the theme of 'crass casualty' leave its central asseveration
unchanged. There are restatements, enlargements of perspective, a slow
and forceful expansion of the personal into the universal, but the truth
once recognised is never suffered for a moment to be hidden or
mollified. Only a superficial logic would point, for instance, to his
'Wonder if Man's consciousness
Was a mistake of God's,'
as a denial of 'casualty.' To envisage an accepted truth from a new
angle, to turn it over and over again in the mind in the hope of
finding some aspect which might accord with a large and general view is
the inevitable movement of any mind that is alive and not dead. To say
that Mr Hardy has finally discovered unity may be paradoxical; but it is
true. The harmony of the artist is not as the harmony of the preacher or
the philosopher. Neither would grant, neither would understand the
profound acquiescence that lies behind 'Adonais' or the 'Ode to the
Grecian Urn.' Such acquiescence has no moral quality, as morality is
even now understood, nor any logical compulsion. It does not stifle
anger nor deny anguish; it turns no smiling face upon unsmiling things;
it is not puffed up with the resonance of futile heroics. It accepts the
things that are as the necessary basis of artistic creation. This unity
which comes of the instinctive refusal in the great poet to deny
experience, and subdues the self into the whole as part of that which is
not denied, is to be found in every corner of Mr Hardy's mature poetry.
It gives, as it alone can really give, to personal emotion what is
called the impersonality of great poetry. We feel it as a sense of
background, a conviction that a given poem is not the record, but the
culmination of an experience, and that the experience of which it is the
culmination is far larger and more profound than the one which it seems
to record.
At the basis of great poetry lies an all-embracing realism, an adequacy
to all experience, a refusal of the merely personal in exultation or
dismay. Take the contrast between Rupert Brooke's deservedly famous
lines: 'There is some corner of a foreign field ...' and Mr Hardy's
'Drummer Hodge':--
'Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern heart and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.'
We know which is the truer. Which is the more beautiful? Is it not Mr
Hardy? And which (strange question) is the more consoling, the more
satisfying, the more acceptable? Is it not Mr Hardy? There is sorrow,
but it is the sorrow of the spheres. And this, not the apparent anger
and dismay of a self's discomfiture, is the quality of greatness in Mr
Hardy's poetry. The Mr Hardy of the love poems of 1912-13 is not a man
giving way to memory in poetry; he is a great poet uttering the cry of
the universe. A vast range of acknowledged experience returns to weight
each syllable; it is the quality of life that is vocal, gathered into a
moment of time with a vista of years:--
'Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,
The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,
Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
For the stars close their shutters and the
Dawn whitens hazily.
Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours
The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!
I am just the same as when
Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers.'
[NOVEMBER, 1919.
We have read these poems of Thomas Hardy, read them not once, but many
times. Many of them have already become part of our being; their
indelible impress has given shape to dumb and striving elements in our
soul; they have set free and purged mute, heart-devouring regrets. And
yet, though this is so, the reading of them in a single volume, the
submission to their movement with a like unbroken motion of the mind,
gathers their greatness, their poignancy and passion, into one stream,
submerging us and leaving us patient and purified.
There have been many poets among us in the last fifty years, poets of
sure talent, and it may be even of genius, but no other of them has this
compulsive power. The secret is not hard to find. Not one of them is
adequate to what we know and have suffered. We have in our own hearts a
new touchstone of poetic greatness. We have learned too much to be
wholly responsive to less than an adamantine honesty of soul and a
complete acknowledgment of experience. 'Give us the whole,' we cry,
'give us the truth.' Unless we can catch the undertone of this
acknowledgment, a poet's voice is in our ears hardly more than sounding
brass or a tinkling cymbal.
Therefore we turn--some by instinct and some by deliberate choice--to
the greatest; therefore we deliberately set Mr Hardy among these. What
they have, he has, and has in their degree--a plenary vision of life. He
is the master of the fundamental theme; it enters into, echoes in,
modulates and modifies all his particular emotions, and the individual
poems of which they are the substance. Each work of his is a fragment of
a whole--not a detached and arbitrarily severed fragment, but a unity
which implies, calls for and in a profound sense creates a vaster and
completely comprehensive whole His reaction to an episode has behind and
within it a reaction to the universe. An overwhelming endorsement
descends upon his words: he traces them as with a pencil, and
straightway they are graven in stone.
Thus his short poems have a weight and validity which sets them apart in
kind from even the very finest work of his contemporaries. These may be
perfect in and for themselves; but a short poem by Mr Hardy is often
perfect in a higher sense. As the lines of a diagram may be produced in
imagination to contain within themselves all space, one of Mr Hardy's
most characteristic poems may expand and embrace all human experience.
In it we may hear the sombre, ruthless rhythm of life itself--the
dominant theme that gives individuation to the ripple of fragmentary
joys and sorrows. Take 'The Broken Appointment':--
'You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.--
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.